Fifth one down

07-02-2007

I was watching an episode of Alias and I just started laughing to myself. It wasn't bad acting or ridiculous plots that I was laughing at, (although they were in attendance) it was the roles that the characters were playing. At some point the series writers had sat down and sketched out profiles for each of the characters of this 'secret CIA team', and came up with "highly trained martial art experts with government training and leet computer skills". Now I'm not poking fun at any secret service here, it's just that the computer skills that these characters seemed to posses had set me off laughing. Why? Because even in the computer industry you rarely come across people possessing all of the computer skills that were being displayed in this program.

In Alias the characters often break into secure locations and are tasked with hooking various gadgets to desktop computers and servers in order to 'hack' into them to steal some data. Now the problem I had with the particular episode that I was watching, and the reason I started laughing, was because there were these two 'agents' sent into a recently bombed building with the aim of recovering some data. They located a damaged server and one asked the other: "Which hard drive do we need?". "Fifth one down" came the reply. Once extracted, the hard drive was handed over to the other agent who connected it to a laptop and proceeded to hack into the data.

So what's wrong with this picture? Well, from experience you rarely come across someone in the IT industry with a variety of hardware and software skills. Most people tend to specialise, keeping to a particular skill set, one that tends to dominate their CV. Its the type of work they do well or enjoy doing (one would hope). They may have other skills which they use outside of their day job but don't usually mention it on their CV, not unless it helps them get a particular job anyway. So to have someone who can not only locate the correct server, but can tell you which hard drive a particular piece of data is supposed to be on (RAID anyone?), extract the hard drive, hook it up to a laptop and run some interface software, then hack into the data.. well, we are definitely talking by the hour contract rates here meladdie.

Recently I glanced through a few IT recruitment web site job adverts for Test Engineers (it pays to keep an eye on your job market). These adverts tend to start with a sample listing of the skills that the company is looking for. Skills such as test planning, writing test cases, automated test tool experience, bug tracking, etc are expected. Then they can get a little ambitious and add some programming skills such as C, C++, Java, etc to the requirements. Still ok-ish as there are some testers with coding experience like myself. We are not going to turn out amazing code like a software developer, but we can certainly read code and carry out some static code walkthroughs. Some adverts don't stop there though, they add experience in various operating systems and network types to the mix, plus some protocols that the company maybe deals with on occasion. Before you know it, just about every part of the IT industry has been mentioned in an advert for a Test Engineer. It just cracks me up as you rarely find people with all these skills (and definitely not at the salary being offered). However if you do find them, keep a hold of them, otherwise they may end up leaving your company and going to work for the CIA.