"Forman, Justin (Justin)** CTR **" wrote: > Many security experts simply love technology and thus come to know it really > well. I haven't heard of many college curriculums (though the scene is > changing) that will take you to that level. However, I have heard of > conferences, educational events, independent training, and a great deal of > self-exploration options that will. My experience in hiring and managing degreed and non-degreed staff is that formal education and self-education produce different results. Self-educated people learn about whatever interests them, and that tends to bias their skills towards the practical end of things. Formally educated people get stuff crammed down their throat whether they like it or not :-) and that makes them aware of more theoretical issues that may not be fun to learn about, but definitely are important. So I seek out degreed people for positions that require theoretical knowledge, and seek self-educated people (degreed or not) for more practical positions. For instance: It would be very useful to WireX to have a program that could examine a perl script and identify a complete list of files that the perl script will attempt to access. A self-educated person might spend a couple of months trying to build such a program. A theoretically aware person will know from the outset that it is provably impossible. NOTE: it is always important to seek self-educated people, whether or not they have a degree. If they aren't sufficiently interested in the area to educate themselves, then they likely won't perform well in the work place, regarding it as "just work." Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com Security Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Apr 26 2001 - 20:16:38 PDT