The Marine Corps taught me more about IT than any certification ever could have. Now to be fair, let me set the stage. It’s the early 90s. Unless you were at a university, IT wasn’t really a career yet. The internet wasn’t public. Computers existed, I had them growing up,but it wasn’t a job. It was a thing. It was a luxury.
What I accidentally learned in the Marines was electronics. Not computers. Electronics. Transistor theory, electrical fundamentals, how current actually works. I spent a year in advanced avionics school learning how to troubleshoot systems on fighter jets. At the time I had no idea any of that would matter for a career in technology. There was no career in technology.
But here’s what I’ve noticed over the last couple decades. The certification world, Microsoft, CompTIA, Cisco, all of it,teaches people how to configure things. How to pass tests. How to get the letters after your name. What it doesn’t teach is fundamentals. And I don’t have a solution for that, I’m just saying I notice the gap.
Here’s a story. I was at a job where we were building racks of servers on cruise ships. I asked my head technician a simple question: how much power do we need for this rack so I can tell the electrician what to provision?
He was a smart guy. Learned IT the way anyone in the 2000s and 2010s would have. He passed his Microsoft tests, his CompTIA tests, his Cisco tests. Good technician. When I asked him about power, he did the math out loud.
“We have six servers. Each has a 1,000-watt power supply and they’re redundant. So that’s six servers times 2,000 watts. We need 12,000 watts.”
Now. This post isn’t written for everybody. Some of you are reading that and thinking OK, 12,000 watts, that’s the number, what’s the problem.
But there’s a few of you who just spit out your coffee.
For those of you who spit out your coffee, thank you for learning the basics.
One of these days I’ll get around to writing a post about why you don’t just nod when someone says 12,000 watts of power. But that’s for another night.