All Cisco certs add cloud, IoT, 'business transformation' Cisco has announced a major refresh of its certification programs, all of which will henceforth include material on cloud, the internet of things, cloud, “network programmability” and “business transformation”. Cloud and IoT are self-explanatory while “network programmability” is software-defined networking by another name. …
" your correspondent has beheld the Borg suggest that kids leaving school should find the prospect of a career in networking as exciting as careers in professions like the law"
People I know that went into the law did do not do it for "excitement" but for a prestigious, well paid job & non too intellectually demanding degree course (a lot of almost rote learning but not much in the way of (in their view) difficult concepts / maths like e.g. theoretical physics) - the people I knew that went into law were generally not from a science / maths background.
I don't see network administrators ever being paid seven figures while only being expected to work 40 hours a week and having unlimited interns/paralegals/$minions to boss around and make do the real work. You know, like the whole reason you go into law.
So, um...how is networking like law again?
At least in the US, law is hurting in very much the same way IT is. There's increasing offshoring of routine legal work, all while law school graduation numbers have increased, leading to a very nasty surprise for new grads who had visions of working for white shoe law firms making 7 figures by age 30. Those jobs still exist, but there are a lot fewer, and they only go to the top graduates of the top 14 law schools in the country, period.
Law firms and management consulting firms operate on an "indoctrination model." They only hire new graduates into their entry classes, and the career progression is a lot like school. The problem is that these days, firms aren't able to bill as much for their services, and therefore can't pay all the new law grads $160,000 a year plus bonus (this is the standard new joiner salary for white shoe firms in New York.) This is where the mystique of a law career comes from -- a rarified world of expensive client paid lunches, secretaries and paralegals to do your bidding, and a lockstep partner-track career that puts you on Easy Street permanently.
So yeah, it's kind of like IT -- offshoring, cost reductions, official education policy forcing more graduates into the market...I see the parallels! :-) The reality of a law career nowadays is that unless you were top of your class at Harvard, Yale or Stanford (or the other top 11,) those Easy Street jobs are out of your reach and you just wasted a quarter million bucks on a legal education.
I'm in Australia so can't comment on the NYC stuff, but the lawyers I know are hard-working, clever people who can wrap their minds around the many nuanced approaches that the law has developed to very complex problems.
yes, it can be a very well-paid profession. As can any job these days that requires high levels of abstract thinking.
"the lawyers I know are hard-working, clever people who can wrap their minds around the many nuanced approaches that the law has developed to very complex problems"
Never met a lawyer like that. All the lawyers I know are pretty cookie-cutter types that push paper, fill our forms, follow patterns and scripts and that's about it. In most ways they resemble bored help desk operators, except that instead of Google or some internal wiki they have some overworked middle-aged woman running around in the back fetching an unending stream of paperwork, doing research and ordering around younger women to do even more research.
These lawyers find creative approaches to absolutely fuck all. Their purpose in life is to tell everyone how screwed they are and that there is absolutely nothing that they can do to help themselves. The law wasn't designed to work in their favour and it never will.
They can - and do - bill unbelievable fuckpiles for their work. They get away with it because the law mandates that all sorts of interactions with government, other companies, etc require a lawyer to be involved.
Like accountants, they have no requirement to innovate or even think, because they have engineered a system that requires everyone to use their "services" regardless of need.
Now, admittedly, the overwhelming majority of my interaction with lawyers is civil issues, not criminal. Perhaps these "hard-working, clever people" end up in criminal law over here. I don't know.
I do know that in Canada the lawyers I've had the misfortune of dealing with are overpaid and underworked. They care so little about their jobs that even when you are physically in a room with them they aren't really there.
Unlike systems administrators this isn't because they're dead inside. It's because the life they live outside the confines of their ridiculously expensive offices is so much more exciting than whatever you're bothering them with that they'd rather relive it in their own memories than deal with whatever issue you've got to be dealt with.
I want some of those hard-working, clever lawyers. Maybe if we had some the little guy would win once in a while on this miserable continent. Maybe if that happened once in a while it would stop being such a corrupt, awful place.
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