Re: [Linux-aus] Accreditation vs. due diligence (Was: Interview with Mark Lloyd from ACS on compulsory accreditation)

[Paul Wayper <paul.wayper@anu.edu.au>]

Nathan Bailey wrote:
> Accreditation is not a quick fix for due diligence.
Great summary of the argument!
> How do you choose a good bookkeeper? (House/extension) builder?
> Mechanic? Hair stylist?
> All these people are likely to have some level of training and
> possibly accreditation. But would you choose them based on their
> accreditation, or on their references, previous case studies, your
> level of comfort and trust, their brand, etc.?
The reality is that this applies to everyone, regardless of their
intelligence, that is asking for someone else to do work for them
outside the fields they know.  I'm getting a roofing contractor to come
in and fix our rusting gutters - I have to trust him (to a certain
extent) when he says that it all has to be pulled off and new stuff put
back on.  A builder might know better.  Uncle Harry might be a lot more
careful about what his teenage nephew was doing on the computer if he
had a background in working on mainframes, or had used Linux and his
nephew recommended Windows.

Accreditation helps to fix this problem, but it still doesn't stop dodgy
operators, inexperienced tyros, or narrow experts giving opinions
outside their expertise.  Some might see my Bachelor's degree in
Computing Science to be some kind of accreditation, but it doesn't mean
that I'm a good choice if you want a COBOL program rewritten in Java,
recommendations on what type of Mac to buy, or how to read from a
barcode scanner.  Accreditation can also end up being quite meaningless,
as testified by the rash of MCSE Boot Camps and people with MCSE
certificates and no clue.

At the worst, accreditation is just another way of controlling who gets
the money.  Look at lawyers: article clerks are paid bargain-basement
salaries and worked hard.  If you survive this for a decade or so, you
get to be a partner and get all the buckets of money the article clerks
aren't getting, while working off their efforts.  And you get to decide
who gets the money!  It's no surprise that the salaries for article
clerks barely follow inflation while top lawyers get paid thousands per
hour.  Look at the worse excesses of unions: forbidding 'unlicensed'
work, and strangling the industry every time they feel like they need a
pay rise.  We need to avoid these bad models.  I'm not saying that
accreditation leads to these practices, but they don't operate without it...

I ultimately see this as just another process of learning that society
must undertake, in the same way that we learned about stranger danger
and not to shout when talking on the telephone.  The key difference
between the computer revolution is that the same person who played with
computers as a child can now move into IT without any change in
equipment or apparent requirement to learn new skills.  You might play
with a meccano set or Lego Technic (tm), but that doesn't give you
anywhere near the skills to rebuild a mower engine, not to mention the
tools or the strength.  In the end, the people making the decision about
getting Nephew Ned to rewrite the billing system will know a bit more
about computers, enough to know that these things don't just spring
forth overnight from prodigies.

JMO,

Paul