Mythic Monday – The Camel Seen For The First Time
- At October 05, 2009
- By Josh More
- In Mythology
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Another Aesop fable is The Camel Seen For the First Time. You can read it here, here or here… but since it’s short, I’ll paraphrase it here. (While the actual text is public domain, the translations are, for the most part, not.)
When humans first say the camel, they found it frightening. It was huge, scary and humpy, so everyone fled. However, as time went by, people discovered that the camel was gentle. As they grew more familiar with it, they began to hold it in contempt and eventually allowed their children to lead it.
The intent of the fable is to basically show that familiarity breeds contempt. It is both a message that one should not fear things unnecessarily, and that one should not become so familiar with something that fear goes away entirely.
I think that this applies to technology as well. We often hear about new technology and how it can be paradigm-changing. However, when we first attempt to deploy such technology we are often baffled and confused. New technology can be incredibly complex and difficult to understand. It can take days of trial and error to figure it out, much less determine how to best fit the technology into your existing infrastructure.
Of course, once you’ve managed to get the technology working, it seems old hat and it is often baffling when new employees don’t pick it up right away. As time goes by, though, they learn the technology and eventually take over.
The lesson here, of course, is to learn from other camel trainers. If you just believe those that have gone before you, you can avoid the whole fear response and jump ahead to figuring out how to train the camel. Then you can get the technology quickly deployed and get on to learning about future species.
Certification – Which certifications to pick – Tech Levels
- At June 12, 2008
- By Josh More
- In Business Security
- 0
We are exploring key considerations for when you are choosing a certification. Today’s consideration is the disparity between levels of technologies.
So, when you’re looking at a certification you may be forced to choose between new technology and current technology. It can get quite confusing. New technology is bright and shiny, and it is often easy to get the passion to study it. However, the problem with this is your career path may not wind up heading in that direction. New technology is fickle and can change or even vanish before it gets stable enough to become mainstream. Consider the risk. If you think that this technology will be around for at least five years, it may be worth learning deeply enough to get a certification. If not, you should probably keep an eye on it and see where it goes.
Current technology has the opposite problem. It’s easy to tell if it’s on your career path, but since it’s been around for a while, it may be hard for you to get up the passion needed to succeed. Also, you run the risk of deprecation. Many technologies (basic languages in particular) expire after a certain period of time, so by the time a technology stops being “new”, it has also lost a certain amount of it’s lifetime.
Of course, it’s never possible to foresee the future, so in the end, you will just have make a best guess and go with it. However, there are a couple things that you can do to mitigate the risks. First, try to pick a general technology, not something overly specific. The more specific something is, the bigger the risk that you are specializing in the wrong area. That said, don’t pick something so general that it’s so watered down that it is useless. Secondly, you might want to hedge your bets. If you see the industry going down two possible paths, pick a certification in each path. That way, you will gain learning that will help and still have a good story to tell.
