Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own Wait, what? It's Monday again? That means it's time for another instalment of Who, Me? What's that, you ask? It's The Register's Monday column in which we tell your tales of technological messes and celebrate your escapes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Alfred" who told us that in the early 1990s he was working on …
I've been on many courses where the trainer has no answers.
some train multiple products, from Firewalls to SQL to Load balancers in the same month.
They know the course but don't know the products. Deploying checkpoint is vastly different to implementing PIX/ASA/FirePower, deploying Citrix LB is different to AVI.
Scratch under the surface and all their comprehension is exposed.
They teach the course and not necessarily the product. Also they often lack experience of running the product in anger so won't understand the nuances when you ask about situations that can arise when the product is deployed.
Still prevalent in UK Medical Schools.
The best Surgeons are fairly bored and their underlings do most of the routine work under their monitoring (often from a distance, while the Surgeon is musing over his latest round of Golf).
Source: I am the outlier in a Medical family.
Or sometimes, while the Surgeon is doing more surgery in the other suite. In either case, the registrar marks time, the anesthetist continues to ventilate the patient, the clock ticks while they wait for the "supervising" surgeon to dash in and fix up the problem the registrar has.
My favorite was in my present job, where I am the company's General Manager. I was asked by our parent company to attend a week-long Leadership Training class that our VP's & Department Heads were taking so everyone would "be on the same page". The course instructor, who looked like he was still in his 20's, seemed to give answers to questions from a script. Well, one look at his LinkedIn profile showed a career that was devoid of any Leadership positions and was nothing but teaching the course since he left college.
My high school chemistry teacher certainly knew his stuff as he had a PhD in the subject.
Unfortunately, his style of teaching involved walking slowly back and forth in front of the blackboard while talking on a slow monotone. His students didn't so much have trouble learning chemistry, we had trouble staying awake as it was so soporific!
The hall of residence professor at my University supposedly had the title of "Most boring lecturer".
Allegedly (I can't remember his name, and google is not finding anything relevant), he claimed this title via a 2 hour lecturer on a very obscure part of his field (Economics), delivered while facing the chalkboard at all times and talking quietly in a monotone.
A few years later he was challenged by a colleague from a different university, and, the story goes, he successfully re-claimed his title in devasting fashion.....
.... by delivering exactly the same lecture, in exactly the same style to the same judges*.
Actually a very nice, gentle and kindly old feller, who seemed inordinately proud of his title.
* one can only wonder at the sanity of said judges: to voluntarily enter that room for a second time ....
The University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, has or at least had a student award "The Golden Pillow". Lecturers competed for the most boring lecture. IIRC one maths lecturer presented a lecture on chirality (left vs right handedness) illustrated with images of snooker balls. He won three consecutive years and retired (from the competition) undefeated. IRL he was an amiable and engaging person and quite a witty lecturer (for a pure mathematician)*.
*I confess to also being a 'Pure Mathematician'. we have strange and interesting personalities and senses of humour. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQHaGhC7C2E
"*I confess to also being a 'Pure Mathematician'. we have strange and interesting personalities and senses of humour. See:"
Ha! If you think I'm looking up an unexplained Youtube link on my work computer at lunchtime, you're in the wrong forum! My employer (understandably) takes a very dim view of such things - and as ex-Desktop Support and having had to clear up several messes (caused by others, not me...) so do I.
But if it's a Youtube vid starring a Mathematician - it wouldn't be Tom Lehrer, would it? And if not, why not??
I was on a TOPS course (Skillcentres - remember them?) in Chelmsford back in the early 1980s doing a Radio/TV/Electronics course. The lecturer spent one warm afternoon droning through some technical stuff that was sending everyone to sleep. He was lecturing from just in front of the bench I was sitting at. There happened to be a TV remote control on the bench so, to everyone else's amusement, I started aiming the remote at the lecturer and pressing the OFF switch continuously. Once he realised that everyone was chuckling, he stopped to see what I was doing. He did get the joke and brought his lecture to a halt a few seconds later to everyone's relief.
I do remember them well as myself & a friend thought about doing the 1 year TV & Radio C&G 224 parts I & II course at a Skill Centre while unemployed in the early 80's.
I eventually got a job, then left it when the dealership lost their Austin Rover franchise to hop onto a 13 week course in basic electronics at the Stoke Skill Center in Plymouth.
From there I did the 2 year day release C&G 224 Part II course, moving to Industrial Equipment* in the second year (which included some microprocessor basics) & hopped on the C&G 224 Part III microcomputing systems evening class as well.
From there it was a 1 year HNC in Swindon with two of the candidates for world record of sending students to sleep especially as we had 3 hour theory lectures with them, please step forward Mr Kerniski (SIC) aka "Chernobyl" & Mr Dangerfield AKA "Dangermouse".
*It was the first year alas where you couldn't take both Industrial & TV\Radio courses & exams together (The divergence used to be something like 75 minutes in a seperate class, but for my year it became the latter half of the morning & post lunch to late afternoon, rejoining the TV guys for the last part into the evening).
You poured the mercury straight onto the bench? You didn't use a protective asbestos board? :-)
I don't know if the presumably fireproof tiles we got at school to put tripods and Bunsen Burners on actually were asbestos. They were dull, grey, concrete-looking and feeling but a little too thin to be that, probably.
You poured the mercury straight onto the bench? You didn't use a protective asbestos board? :-)
Well, we did not, the teacher did. I mean, come on! It was only a poisonous neurotoxin being played with by adolescent boys and girls*, what could possibly have gone wrong? not like it was going to burst into flames or anything.
We did have asbestos mats for Bunsen burners but only used those in chemistry lessons.
*(yes, some girls studied science in the 1970's)
>I don't know if the presumably fireproof tiles we got at school to put tripods and Bunsen Burners on actually were asbestos.
Should have been repalced by the 1970s (in the UK) - in practice ......
Metallic mercury is pretty safe, the vapour pressure is low enough that you aren't breathing much in from a beaker at room temperature. Organic mercury compounds that can get absorbed = orribly dangerous.
Mercury isn't that dangerous and eyegoggles or breathing mask would make no sense if you're handling mercury one single time. Mercury is dangerous if it sinks for example into cracks in the floor of a room that is permanently inhabited because the very little bit of it that will vaporize will accumulate in the air and finally in the bodies of it's inhabitants over the years.
Pure mercury doesn't chemically react with anything in your metabolism so you could swallow a teaspoon (if you manage to get that heavy mass down) it would go out in the same condition as it got in. The toxic stuff are mecury phosphates or other organic compounds that will accumulate in maritime life in mercury-contaminated water. These metallo-organic compounds are dangerous as fuck but are a very different matter as pure elemenal Me-metal in the way that pure oxygen or hydrogen are different from water.
My father remembers using a mouth pipette to transfer amounts of mercury during chemistry lessons, and would have inhaled some mercury vapour as a result. I accept your superior knowledge regarding the reactiveness or otherwise of liquid mercury, but it is still an element I am trying to keep away from. I have had quite a few mercury amalgam fillings in my teeth, but when they need replacing I go for ceramic ones. UK dentists are not allowed to put mercury fillings in the teeth of children any more.
Back in the late 70s when I was at Secondary School our Chemistry teacher did what she termed "bucket chemistry".
It was fun, we learnt, both when things when right and wrong. We also learnt and remembered lots about chemistry. Now compare that with geography where most people appeared to be asleep.
H&S, Nah, that did not exist then. A few things were known to be dangerous, some even dangerously unsafe.
On more than one occasion I can recall a large cloud of noxious fumes blowing over the football pitch where the buckets were being experimented with.
My A-level chemistry teacher was also the school safety rep.
Only issue was he was also a lunatic, who actually taught us to make stuff like nitrogen tri-iodide (which we did quite regularly) and even on one occasion TNT (we were doing something with toluene and his comment was "whatever you do, don't do <age addled brain cannot remember> or it'll become TNT"). So of course some of my peers decided to make some, which resulted in a small beaker that was used being found the next morning in a prep room fume cupboard (where it had been left intact the night before) in many small pieces.
His favourite experiment (which we did several times) was the red lead rocket/volcano/fountain, and apparently one time (so he told us) he did the "balloon full of hydrogen popping" experiment with a wheelie-bin bag and only avoided taking out all the windows in the classroom by another teacher opening the door to come in at an opportune moment.
I ended up as a Physicist by training (and electronics process engineer by employment) but will always remember his lessons fondly. Nice one Michael, wherever you are (and in however many pieces).
"whatever you do, don't do <age addled brain cannot remember> or it'll become TNT")
Nitric acid, IIRC.
We used to have a glass jar of picric acid in the school chemicals cupboard. It had been there so long that crystals had formed around the glass stopper, and we were warned never to try to open it because the friction of the stopper against the glass could cause the crystals to detonate. Instead it was put on the top shelf for "safety", happily it never fell off....
Our A-level chemistry teacher said that when he was a student he dropped a 1-pound block of pure sodium into the river off a bridge, to see what would happen. It was apparently spectacular, but he never let us use more than tiny fragments. Even one of them dropped into the sink drain was fun, because instead of simple U-bends that could be blocked those drains had large cylindrical traps part-filled with water. Drop sodium in there and it would fizz quietly and happily until the released H₂ combined with enough O₂ to reach an explosive concentration, at which point there was a very loud bang and a flame about 1m long erupted vertically from the sink drain. The trick, of course, was to surreptitiously drop the sodium into the drain on someone else's bench...
Posting anon for obvious reasons.
When I was a high school science nerd half a century ago I lived in a USA town that had a famously polluted river. The toxic sludge on top was so corrosive boats did not linger there. It was also flammable. Somebody conceived the idea of "chicken fat bombs". These were small bits of sodium which would be wrapped in a material that excluded water, like well-dried sheets of chicken fat. Drop one into said river and the sludge on top would dissolve the coating just as the sodium pellet hit the mostly water below. usually just an impressive boom and fountain, but the "experiments" stopped when a riverside structure caught fire.
Bullies did not go after the science nerds then, either. Not after one nasty bully got his locker surreptitiously opened, and a booby trap consisting of a safety pin attached to the hasp, rigged to puncture a capsule of methyl mercaptan, poised to release the substance the next time the locker was opened. Everything in the locker probably needed to be double-bagged before discarding it.
"bucket chemistry"
I remember the thermite reaction. Standard small crucible in a fire bucket full of sand, reagents inside the crucible, magnesium ribbon fuse lit.
They never did get the scorch marks out of the ceiling ...
Icon - 'coz that is what it looked like, as I recall. :o)
Thermite... Brings back memories. Back in the summer between the 4th and 5th grades I was introduced to "volcanoes" made from Ammonium Permaganate (I believe that is what it was, it was a LONG time ago!). You lit it of and it made brown "magma" and looked like a volcano. Then my older brother returned from high school for the simmer where he observed thermite reactions. We then went down to the local "scientific" store and bought ingredients for more reactions. No problem, Iron oxide, and aluminum powder from the nearby paint store (I still don't know why they had it). We mixed them together and lit it off to much excitement, and even recovered the iron pelet that was the result of the reaction.
Fast forward to my own chemistry lessons and one "after school" session witht he chemistry teacher setup a nice thermite reaction. It was setup on a stand with a bunch (3 sheets) of asbestos sheets to capture the resultant (very very hot!) iron result. Well, we set it off and the iron went right through the multi sheet asbestos barriers much like hot knifes through butter only to make a nice divot in the chemistry lab bench surface. It remained that way for the rest of the time I was in high school, and (I assume) a bunch of years after that. I don't know the final fate of said lab top, but we did try to patch it with something like a bondo product (it could have been JB Weld) to no avail. High school chemistry was interesting to say the least.
My A Level Chemistry teacher spent the first lesson teaching us things he theough were more important for sixth formers to know than A Level Chemistry, such as how to wire a 3 pin plug, how to replace a fuse wire in a ye olde style fuse box, and how to turn an incandesant light bulb into a lethal weapon by cutting it open with a diamond ring and filling it with either hydroflouric acid or magnesium filings before super gluing it back together.
Ahhh Chemistry teachers, ours was a right schitzo nut job, which was understandable as a lid she grew up under German Occupation in the channel islands.
Icon - Alas no fun experiments like the ones mentioned above to my aged recall I guess elfin safety kicked in by the last two years of the 1970's.
We all got bundled out of one of our Chemistry lessons after someone had tidied up. They had tidied the hose from the fume cupboard into a neat coil, rather than hanging it out of the window.
For reasons best known to the LEA, we did metalwork using a variety of lethal equipment and a full size traditional forge built into the classroom. The teacher was elderly and easily distracted. The kid that always got bullied really dreaded metalwork lessons.
Wasn't it the information boards on the walls that were made from asbestos? The ones that they were forever stapling and pinning things to, and which kids would chisel away at.
It always amuses me nowadays when people fret about microaggressions and online harms. At school in the 80s we had proper threats like torture, suffocation and mutilation. Stuff you can't block with a click.
"cutting [an incandescent light bulb] open with a diamond ring and filling it with either hydroflouric acid or magnesium filings before super gluing it back together."
The hydrofluoric acid wouldn't have stayed there long. I had a long struggle over the years trying to tighten up the waste pipe on a leaking lab sink. It never worked and I eventually realised somebody must have washed too much hydrofluoric acid down it and dissolved the glaze (it was a Belfast sink in a Belfast lab). It probably didn't do the glaze earthenware sewage pipe much good either.
I remember the warnings about hydrofluoric acid from silicon wafer etching classes. Wasn't it the stuff that you didn't want to spill on your finger, because by the time you noticed the pain it had already eaten through the flesh and started on the bone? We were regaled with stories about people not noticing pinhole leaks in rubber gloves, until they pulled the glove off to see what was stinging and part of their finger stayed in the glove. Nasty, nasty stuff.
Yes, indeed, handle with caution except -
We used it to extract pollen from soil layers. The outer part of polen is almost indestructible so after washing in NaOH soln to remove humins (sic) the samples were boiled in HF in platinum crucibles over a small bunsen burner before being centrifuged in polypropylene tubes. Fortunately I didn't have many of those to do but SWMBO had lots.
Filling hydroflouric acid in a lightbulb (or trying to do so) is quite an ugly way of killing yourself. Basically anything meddling with HF is. The good news is that you won't feel any pain because the HF will dissolve your nerve cells first when it washes the tissue from your bones. (bones take a few seconds longer to dissolve).
"we had trouble staying awake as it was so soporific"
We had a lecturer like that. Her monotone wasn't particularly low but it hit a very distinct, ringing pitch. She had a slight Geordie twang*. In my final year there was fresher who was also a Geordie, again, not with a strong accent normally. He told me that in one class he replied to her with a slightly raised accent and by the end of the hour the positive feedback loop had left the rest of the class floundering.
* Note to non-UK readers: advanced Geordie is inaccessible to the rest of us. Great folk, though and their countryside is arguably the most unspoiled area of England.
First year of our engineering course we had a 3-lecture series on "the professional engineer", supposedly covering ethical aspects of engineering.
All 200 undergrads were there for the first one, only 50 turned up for the second. For the last one there were 8 students present, until he threw one out for falling asleep...
We had a 1 lecure a week maths course. Biologists didn't take kindly to maths. We started turning up a little later each week so the lecturer did so too. Then one week we all turned up on time, he wasn't there so we all left and never came back.
Reputedly one of the chemistry lecturers in QUB had a number of laws of lecturing. A colleague who'd been one of his students used to quote one "The mind cannot absorm more than the bottom can support."
When I was doing my ONC the lecturer for one subject was far too clever and would spend the whole lesson filling out various blackboards with notes we had to copy down and then the last 10 minutes writing down the homework we had to complete before the next 'lesson'. Nobody passed his class and we had a different lecturer for the repeat year
At school, we started the new academic year with a new head of Maths. By the New Year, we had a new new head of Maths as all the pupils kept going to other Maths teachers to be re-taught what we were being told in class as no-one could understand the teacher.
For 'O' level History 1955-59 our teacher was straight out of teacher training after National Service. His flawed technique was to spend the first year dictating all the notes for the subsequent 3 years. Of course most of us lost the notes before the start of year 2.
I think maths is prone to that. The teacher spends a lot of time explaining what's perfectly obvious to anyone except a mathematician and then suddenly there's a rearrangement of equations at sleight of hand speed, possibly with a new bit of notation thrown in and the blackboard's wiped clean for the next stage.
...possibly with a new bit of notation thrown in and the blackboard's wiped clean for the next stage.
Back in my prehistoric undergrad days, we had a lecturer who had refined that one. He would write two or three blackboards worth of stuff up (the boards were side by side), and then proceed to pace up and down in front of them whilst lecturing/explaining.
The problem was he also (for some reason) insisted on wearing his academic robes when teaching, and every time he about-faced they billowed out and did a fair job of wiping the board behind him. So after a few minutes there were large gaps in his text, which he never seemed to notice for some reason.
Hence we had to frantically copy stuff down as he was writing it at the beginning, as we knew full well that it wouldn't survive the time when he was actual explaining it.
Suffice it to say he was not a popular lecturer.
I think this is a variation on George Bernard Shaw's "Those that can do, those that can't teach". The reality is that those with the expertise to deliver these courses can likely earn way more from doing the job itself (or being consultants)–even given the eye-watering prices that they charge for those courses. The training companies are left with people who'll give it a go and deliver something.
>I think this is a variation on George Bernard Shaw's "Those that can do, those that can't teach".
Which is a riff on Charlemagne's "let those who can, teach". He was a big proponent of learning after the end of the Roman Empire / (not really) dark ages - but now nobody remembers the original.
Those who don't teach don't realise what a skill teaching/coaching is.
One aspect of that is knowing your subject (and not just knowing what someone else's slides say)
Far too many corporate instructors fail on both counts.
On the rare occasions I'm in a course with a teacher who both knows their subject and can teach I really go out of my way to recognise them as they are too few of them.
Yes, this is very true. The company I work for produce a lot of training to teach our products to people, but looked at from a professional teaching point of view, they're terrible and not really fit for purpose. I've suggested on more than one occasion that we employ a qualified teacher to develop and deliver the courses, but nobody seems to understand the issue.
Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions - one friend has gone from a highly stressful Senior Management role in a school, to basically delivering lessons that are already planned, and got doesn't have to deal with angsty teenagers, parents or Ofsted, has for a significant salary bump and still regards a 40 hour week as part time!
"Yes, this is very true. The company I work for produce a lot of training to teach our products to people, but looked at from a professional teaching point of view, they're terrible and not really fit for purpose. I've suggested on more than one occasion that we employ a qualified teacher to develop and deliver the courses, but nobody seems to understand the issue."
Having a teaching qualification may not help, judging by the many teachers I've encountered. I'd suggest you hire a video game company, as many of them are genii when it comes to quickly and effectively teaching somebody a complex interface and game structure.
"Yes, this is very true. The company I work for produce a lot of training to teach our products to people, but looked at from a professional teaching point of view, they're terrible and not really fit for purpose."
Having spent some time teaching in the earlier part of my career, I wholeheartedly agree with the above. It also applies to most online "training" courses I've had to complete apart from the very few "live" ones with a real person the group can interact with.
Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions..
Similarly, when I was starting out in education (teacher, then industry .. I could do so did!) at the start of the oil boom in Scotland, new science teachers who were being recruited for the northern isles (Orkney/Shetland) were being poached by the oil companies at massively inflated salaries.
The most efficient and best organised people I know are both primary school teachers. If you can keep a class of 30 six-year-olds working quietly for 5 hours per day every day of each week for years you are a Super-Hero.
And they always find the missing pair of scissors at the end of the school day, somehow.
SWMBO had spent a couple of years teaching before we met. I'd just been working for a firm of biological suppliers to schools. It had gone bankrupt (invested a lot in making microscopes just as the Japanese were entering the market). She says we still owe her the dissecting scissors she'd ordered.
I was in the RAF 1959-73 and for my final 3 years I was an instructor. There was an intensive 3 week course "Instructional Techniques" at RAF Upwood which gave all of us great confidence in our ability to teach our particular subjects. I believe that in later years the course gained national recognition
"Those who don't teach don't realise what a skill teaching/coaching is."
Some of those who do teach don't realise it either. Those who've been on the receiving end of those who taught but didn't have it recognise full well that it is. Possibly the worst to suffer from were Latin teachers on the basis that with a classics degree and none of the greasy pole climbing ability to get into politics teaching was the only career irrespective of aptitude.
Much the same applies to management which is why there are few managers and many manglers.
Regards corporate trainers...At university, I had to take an assembly language programming course. My choices were: PDP-11 (and fight the CS students for access to the small number of machines) or Control Data CYBER-74 (one section).
Being a contrarian, and preferring to sleep at night, rather than program PDP_11s, I signed up for the CYBER course. The instructor turned out to be a very capable customer engineer that the school had gotten with their new CYBER. Apparently, CDC provided an engineer to help convert apps and such for the first year of machine rental. We didn't have any apps to convert, so they set him to teaching undergrads COMPASS, the CDC assembler. Of course, the way you were supposed to enter your programs involved a card punch and batch processing. I did that exactly once, then discovered I could submit jobs remotely from my Teletype and get much faster turnaround. Turned out to be a fun course.
Of course, I have forgotten ALL I learned, but I still have the card decks in the attic ssomewhere...
This is very true, but simply being good at something doesn't mean you can teach it. Some of the worst people I've seen at explaining things are those who know a product inside and out - simply because they don't understand how little other people know about the product!
A friend who used to lecture part-time once told me he was often asked to lecture courses outside his area of technical expertise. He was a fast learner and reckoned that, as long as he was one chapter ahead in the course book, he would get by.
He was obviously capable as he only stopped taking on such work when his main line of business didn't give him any spare time. And, in his late 80's, he's still running seminars and training sessions worldwide...
Very true, knowing and transferring that knowledge are two different and quite distinct skillsets.
I live in France where, apart from having degrees/PhDs in a subject, if you want to teach it, you have to do a year supplementary training, (either in class or on your own) with an exam afterwards, then follow up inspections. Even then, people get through that shouldn't be in the classroom.
My French wife is an English teacher, and had to do the exam twice before passing, (she failed the oral part of her first attempt because a question touched on politics - a big no no in French education, and she fell into the trap laid by one of the examiners).
The point being that on her first exam attempt she met someone she had known in University, he had gone on to get a PhD in English but had failed the teaching exam twice because his spoken English and his ability to each were not good enough. Thus highlighting the good and bad points of the French education system in one example. The guy had gotten a PhD in English literature with no real ability to speak it, and the teaching exam prevented him from being let loose in the classroom.
I do recall attending advanced IBM courses in AIX clustering software and without exception they were taught by retirees from IBM who knew and had worked on the systems, both HACMP and the AIX. Giving hints and commands that were not in any book or manual on the subjects.
I've been on a "speed awareness course" where we were told...
- all speed cameras are yellow to make sure they're visible. Nope, we're near an AONB where they weren't allowed to do that, but still put in cameras - green to not ruin the view, but with a splash of yellow to comply with regulations.
- all speed cameras that flash are rear facing. Nope, the city ~50 miles away has front-facing flashers, including the one that caught me.
There were various other smaller issues but completing the course was required otherwise I'm sure many would have walked out.
Ha! Been there. Photo of road with not too far to a bend and poking out of trees a bit further on were some street lights but none before the bend. We were expected to work out from that that the road we were on was a 30 limit. Sometime later I was on a road from Grange-over-Sands which looked quite similar. The road was at 40 although without a repeater sign in view you wouldn't have known it from a photo. The street-lights in view above the trees were on a roundabout between two stretches of dual carriageway at national speed limit.
Many years ago my then employer selected BAAN (I said it was a while ago) as their designated global ERP system. Having spent a few months commuting to the US as part of the implementation team I went on a course at the BAAN UK headquarters for a few days to learn about their application customiser; it quickly became apparent that the person leading the course neither knew the subject or could teach! As he was the only person in the UK who knew anything at all about that part of the software this was somewhat worrying. I spent half my time on the course helping the other students.
A few months later I went after an implementation consultant gig with BAAN, offering the fact that I knew and could actually use, the customiser as a USP but it quicky became clear they didn't actually care about helping the customer, all their consultants were employed to do was upsell more product - I wasn't offered the role but would have turned it down anyway. Probably a good thing as BAAN didn't last all that much longer due to some iffy accounting practices.
Had a lecturer who was only one page ahead of the class. Z80 assembler programming was his subject and I had magazine articles/solutions published on the subject before I went to University.
I was asked to leave his first lecture as I was "disrupting the class and obviously didn't need to attend" - I only pointed out his incorrect bo11ocks 3 times within 10 minutes.
I made a tidy sum from tutoring the students on that class. It paid for a lot of caving gear.
The Barstool only gave me 99% for that course. The Dean (who I was invited to meet due to my mark) said that the lecturer had knocked off a mark for non-attendance at his lectures!
(Just looked up his name and he co-authored a number of papers before he retired - quoting Laminitus as the reason - (just so that if you are reading this, you know that I know you went on to better things.))
Had a lecturer who was only one page ahead of the class. Z80 assembler programming was his subject and I had magazine articles/solutions published on the subject before I went to University.
Similar to my university experience, then. I spent three years wondering when the course would actually get to any of the things I'd already done four or five years previously, and spent most of my time doing my own coding and writing magazine articles. I was continuously telling myself: I'm just a student, these lecturers clearly are wiser than me and know what they're doing, they *must* be because they're the lecturers, I'm just the lowly student, clearly we'll get to some actual real stuff soon.....
On a processor course the instructor was explaining the crowbar circuit on the 5 volt power supply. This is a bit of circuitry that blows a fuse by deliberately shorting the power through a resistor. He tried to tell us that a 1000 ohm resistor would blow a 20 amp fuse and when I pointed that a 1000 ohm resistor would only pass 5mA at 5 volts he didn't believe me and just carried on lecturing us.
The best (ie worst) one I ever had was the mandatory safety training when going on-site at a certain customer.
Course given by a young lad who had no clue, including a slide on LOTO (lock-out, tag-out). All fine, except the breaker was locked out in the ON position, not the OFF one.
So being the engineering sort (as well as a trainer myself within our company, both for over 25 years) I told him there was something wrong with his slide and asked him if he could spot it.
I left him staring at it and looking confused for a few minutes before pointing out the issue, with the suggest that he go find whoever actually wrote his course and do something highly unsafe to them.
Biggest problem of all though was I went back to the same site a couple of years later and had to redo the course (it was an annual one).
Different trainer (although equally clueless) but guess what, exactly the same (uncorrected) slide.
Deja-vu kicked in, followed later in the afternoon by a quiet word with our company safety officer that if the customer course wasn't corrected, we should threaten stop work and decline to go on-site for safety reasons until it was corrected (ironically the customer in question makes big lip-service about safety).
Same, I've done courses on storage, servers, alpha, Intel, MS, Cisco, various 'nix environment, AS400 etc etc and with very few exceptions the trainer knew jack all beyond the course.
They're pretty much always a joke designed to extract money (lots of it) from companies which need quals to get work or retain access to manufacturer's walled garden, there were distinct differences between the techs who knew stuff and those who'd just got the paper to say they did.
"I've been on many courses where the trainer has no answers."
If Dabbsey was still on staff, I'm sure he'd be joining in with memorable occasions of turning up to run a training course and finding at the last minute it wasn't quite whar he was hired to do and had to learn/bluff his way through :-)
..run a training course and finding at the last minute it wasn't quite what he was hired to do..
I had something similar to that in Mumbai for a national Telco. I was booked to run a course on SMS fraud and similar stuff for a handful of techs (state of the art at the time). We were squashed into a hot cramped cupboard .. but when I laid out the agenda for the sessions there was a bit of consternation and folk started making apologies and leaving the room. Within a few minutes I was ushered to a lecture theatre and asked if I could do my presentation on the LIVE system in front of a hundred or so folk!
[Yes, everything went well; I knew my stuff, answered all the questions that were thrown at me and did some requests that identified SMS spamming in progress in real time so a good session and a happy customer]
If Dabbsey was still on staff, I'm sure he'd be joining in with memorable occasions of turning up to run a training course and finding at the last minute it wasn't quite whar he was hired to do and had to learn/bluff his way through :-)
I once turned up for a training course, and discovered they thought I was there to teach it!
I spent the final 20 years of my EE career, working for a small consulting company. Brilliant coworkers and a very eclectic mix of professions. We did everything from business strategy to product design. Often, a client would walk in the door and ask us to convert his lab bench full of test gear into a saleable product. We did consumer, scientific and medical product design, and got quite good at it.
To say that there was much learning on our part, would be an understatement. The clients, though, seemed to expect this -- they knew the science and were willing to help us understand it, while we knew product design and development, which is why they came to us.
Best job I ever had. We were never bored. Met some very interesting people.
Elephant Husbandry in SE Asia...
When J. H. Williams went to work for the Bombay-Burmah Trading Corporation, he knew nothing of working with Elephants. Later, he was to be known as "Elephant Bill"...
I generally give programming courses to beginner programmers. They need to learn everything : variables, variable types, functions and procedures, passing variables to said functions and procedures, etc.
One time, however, I got a group of expet JAVA dwevelopers. So, to break into their mindset was rather challenging and, for them, I pretty sure the absence of any method controlling garbage colletion was anatheama to them.So I coded a seconde node where I created a smal collection of docuements and a script that would loop through the collection.
Once the code had loaded the next document, I used the keyword DELETE to remove the previous document from RAM.
The thing is, I had never used that keyword before. I didn't even know if it would work.
Thankfully, it did, and I avoided making a total fool of myself, but it could have easily gone the other way . . .
I went on a course "Advanced troubleshooting for NT 4", or something along those lines. Throughout the course I kept thinking "I know this already ready. When is the Advanced bit going to start." Near the end of the week long course, the instructor got onto the blue screen of death, and said that the crash dump file provided information on what was happening when it crashed, and could be used to diagnose the problem. "Ah ha! This is what I've been waiting for" was my thought. "That is beyond the scope of this course," he continued.
When I did my CSE in Computer Science, my teacher proudly announced he would be taking the exam with us! There were 2 of us in the class that had Commodore computers at home and were already fairly familiar with how to program them, even if I only had a VIC20, not a PET. I grabbed the system manual, which included a lot on machine code and sys calls.
Within a couple of weeks, the teacher was doing the history of computing part of the course and Alan and I were coaching the other pupils on the practical side of writing programs. Although I was only doing CSE, I got several As (anonymously) for O-level projects as well. One of the pupils needed a lot of help and just to make sure he read my code and understood, I put in a copyright notice at the end, I managed to give him a hint about that just before he handed the project in for marking and he removed the lines, with a very red face!
When I was studying A-level Computer Studies, I was coaching the O-level teacher at lunchtime. I used to run the "open to anyone" lab at lunchtime and so everyone knew that I was coaching the teacher, but to her credit she knew how to teach and most students passed her course. Miss "fingers" Lymm.
Way back in the early 80s (late 20th century as my kids call it... sigh) my school got a new computer lab with 40 IBM PCs in 10 Severance style pods sharing a dot matrix printer. Our teacher was nice and a good history teacher, but out of his depth teaching BASIC. Three friends and I would amuse ourselves by writing completing the day's in-class assignment in as few lines as possible of BASIC, more kudos if we got it done in one line. Fun times. Usually we'd be done before he finished explaining things.
About half a century ago a friend of mine got her English degree and found a job teaching at a small school in Cornwall. When she got there she discovered she had to teach Latin as well, a language she was completely unfamiliar with. So she started on the textbooks and tried to be one week ahead of the class. Needless to say, some annoying kid was two weeks ahead of the rest of his class and kept asking annoying questions.
My former colleague, who was Head of IT at a prep school, was "asked" (with no option to say no) to teach a French class - despite not knowing anything more than very rusty GCSE French from 20+ years prior. He was literally one page ahead of the pupils in the textbook, sometimes having to introduce "fun activities" to slow the class down!
I'm generally sympathetic to trainers; they know they might be up against some trainees with more knowledge/experience than them but what can they do? Even as a self-diagnosed expert myself, I've never failed to learn something from a trainer.
Real experts know that they don't know everything. There are, of course, some who know this is not true.
On the other hand, I've had experts who come in to tell us how we should be doing things, find out they know nothing, learn how it should be done, and then go away. Never fast enough.
That seemed to be the understanding amongst the lecturers and grad students when I was a grad student in Cambridge.
I seem to recall my Ancient Greek teacher at school admitting that he was only one step ahead of the class.
So three cheers for Alfred the Great!
Yes! That's what the pay as a teaching assistant is offset by. The years I helped teaching the maths courses were really useful. It also helps having taught basic stats to geography students when in a later job you have to educate management beyond such difficult terms like "mean" :D
Correction from - https://media.pluto.psy.uconn.edu/Quantum%20Mechanics%20quotes.htm
"Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it." - Niels Bohr
"If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it." - John Wheeler
Also, five paragraphs from Richard Feynman, with, emphasised: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
And some plain insults against quantum mechanics by other famous names.
I spent New Year at a friend's place in North Germany, I was living in the South at the time. He started a new job on the 2nd January and I had just met a girl where he lived and as I was between contracts and waiting for confirmation on the new one, I was spending a couple more days at his place...
He rang up in the late morning and asked if I could do PHP and whether I wanted a couple of weeks work, his new employer was looking for someone? YES, of course I wanted a couple of weeks work in the area!
I had an interview the next day... I quickly researched and found LAMP, installed it on my PC and went to w3schools... By the end of the day I had a basic website up and running in PHP and had taught myself a few basic bits of JavaScript (I had developed in C, COBOL, VB, C++, 4D, FORTRAN, Pascal, Jaca and a bunch of other languages over the year. so there wasn't anything terribly new with PHP or JavaScript, except they weren't very structured).
Aced the interview the next day and started 2 days later. Luckily I was working on an existing project, so I could look through the existing code. It started well, I was holding my head above water... Then there was a big problem with one of their eShops (they built shops for big customers, mostly in the clothing industry). Every time the customer's site appeared in the PayPal newsletter, the site collapsed and the dbadmin spent his time restarting MySQL ever 2-3 minutes. They saw I knew SQL Server and called me in to analyse the problem.
I'd never used MySQL before, but I quickly dived into the documentation and started looking at the code. They were busy adding more and more fields to the indexes, in the hope it would speed up - the code to call up the menu took around 60 seconds, when the server was under load (250 users across 3 front end servers and 1 SQL server on the backend). I quickly came to the conclusion that the coders had never learnt how to write SQL queries and were just writing them as if they were being interpreted by a human, starting with the biggest dataset and whittling it down through additional clauses in the WHERE statement, until they got what they needed.
I just turned the query on its head, started with the most restrictive table and built out from there. The query time dropped from 60 seconds to 0.01 seconds and the 3 front end servers could cope with 750 parallel transactions without breaking a sweat... The company was so impressed, they offered me a permanent position - the first person to not be on a rolling 1 year employment contract.
I went on to write a tracking system for their photo studios, which were getting hundreds of products a day to photograph for the shops, brochures and adverts. It was fast, simple and worked flawlessly... I documented it as I went and the PHPDoc generated around 1,500 pages of documentation on using the various classes APIs I'd written. I left the company soon after. About 5 years later, a new dev added me as a contact on LinkedIn and thanked me for the documentation, he had taken over the project and it was still going strong.
Had something like the SQL thing with a client's Informix query. We weren't allowed to run UPDATE STATISTICS by the application developer (I recognised it as lack of confidence on the query optimiser on their part combined with skills learned in writing queries for the original pre-SQL, pre-optimiser version). I let the query explainer do its stuff, so what was happening without the benefit of the statistics and rearranged it with temporary tables. The report that they'd never run successfully, not even overnight, ran in about 10 minutes.
In my first employment, as a junior dev, circa '97, I was working with an expert contracted for his extensive DB2 knowledge. He was supposed to set up a battery of DB tests on a Friday for me and my mates to follow up during the weekend (as this was a Y2K project and time was running short, we, the minions, would be there - but not the expensive contractor).
The bad news is that he managed to screw up every single test he was supposed to prepare by not allocating disk space for it as z/OS required - and then leaving logs of it for us to see. That meant he had just wasted the whole team a Saturday. By the end of that day I'd managed to redo - this time correctly - everything the expert was supposed to have done for us and our team got it's work done for others to pick up the next Monday.
The good news it that, on Monday, our manager heard us arguing about what had happened (I may have been expressing in not very pleasant terms how pissed off I was about all that sorry affair) and, after investigating it, called me apart and told me I wouldn't need to worry about it any more as the 'expert' was no longer working there.
Even better news is that I also got promoted a month or so later, with the way I handled that incident being a factor.
I had a "lecturer" in first year university.
He was teaching the C Programming for Engineers course.
He was basically a chapter ahead of the class in whichever dodgy textbook he'd learned from, including its dodgy library that he was teaching as if it was standard.
I failed every assignment because the lecturer didn't understand my compliant C.
Then there was the networking course that the company sent a lot of us on early in my career. Run by a guy who made a point of mentioning his physics degree every 30 seconds or so. He eventually kicked me out for correcting him every time he opened his mouth.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, provide "training".
The Netware term for a BSOD was 'abnormal end' or Abend. German speaking customers would naturally stress the first syllable and pronounce it the same as their word for 'evening'. I couldn't work out why they were so concerned about what would happen with the service after hours.
Back when I was the George 3 'guru' in the Wellington ICL Service Bureau, I'd barely sat down one Monday AM before a a Sales droid rocked up and told me that, since our chief client instructor was off sick and I was the only bod in the office who knew George 3 well enough to run a course on it, I was the weeks course instructor with immediate effect.
Explaining that I wasn't a qualified ICL instructor didn't get me off the hook, but did at least get me the morning to read the sick instructor's notes. That, and the G3 manual and previous Undergraduate experience from giving a seminar on graphite intercalation compounds (my MSc topic, which had required experience with X-Ray crystal analysis, Mossbauer spectroscopy, and [of course] wet chemistry proved to be just enough background to get me through giving the week's George 3 course. Of course, it also helped that I knew one or two of the people on the course and that they knew that I was a last-minute replacement for the regular guy. Of course it also helped that by then I'd been the Service Bureau's George 3 guru for almost a year.
True story, my headmaster at secondary school had a degree in history. At his first job interview for a teaching post he was accepted and the recruiting headmaster said:
"Oh, and you'll be taking the 3rd year for German."
"But I don't speak German!"
"It's only June."
(He was very busy that summer. )
Back in France I used to work as the IT guy at an automotive parts distributor, and one day I was requisitioned by one of the sales people to go and check a tire balancing machine at a client's shop, somewhere in the wilderness. Or was it the wheel alignment station.
I was adamant that I'm not the best for this, but his words were - it has a monitor.
There was a lot riding on this, as we were (apparently) trying to sell these as a more reasonably priced alternative to the local Facoms that we were also selling, which were priced, let's say, patriotically.
I went there, the relevant part of the machine turned out to be a little cabinet on wheels - once I opened the side door, it turned out there was a Windows PC inside.
Managed to start it, then it turned out it was all in Italian, with some quite elaborate bespoke system menu to go through.
The salesperson who got me there was half-Italian, so I thought we'd be good. Nope. He couldn't understand a word. I was at what seemed to be the last step, but it was a Yes/No (Si/No ? S/N ?) and I wasn't feeling lucky.
Well - when I was in 4th grade I found two Topolino books (turned out it's Mickey Mouse in Italian), and those were my only comics books for three years. So I knew that Uncle Donald Duck is Zio Paperone, and la mancia (tips) is something he never gives. Plus in Summer when the weather was very, very clear, I'd be able to catch a few minutes of Rai tv per day and I'd watch the news, as the ladies reading them were very, very good looking.
This turned out to be enough all those decades later for me to be able to call the support line in Italy, fight my way to an engineer, who guided me in (slow) Italian, and get the machine to work. I was a hero.
The day went downhill from there, but that's very different story.
A very long time ago I had to man a stall at the "Racing Car Show" in Birmingham UK. I was designing H/W, S/W and radio data comms for most of the F1 teams at this point.
A guy turned up claiming to be from Ferrari - no one I recognised from the F1 team - but I had to believe him as he could have been from the road car team.
I managed to cobble together someone who could speak Italian and French fluently and someone who could speak French and English fluently to join our conversation together. Luckily, it didn't have to go much further than introductions and he gave up and said "I'll get Ross to ring you on Monday". Ross was an English engineer working for Ferrari who I knew and speaking to him on Monday, I found out that this guy was a "hanger on" and was trying to wangle a free lunch.
Nah. What got Liz in deep doo-doo was her Dunning-Kruger. She had convinced herself that she was too smart to do college, and started the company, based on her (very) incomplete understanding of the field. When reality struck (as it does), she simply couldn't accept that she was wrong...and doubled down.
A cautionary tale about hubris if there ever was one.
So... once upon a time I got to:
1. port a large FORTRAN-77 project intended for Big Iron to 'a more modern software base', in this case Modula-2. (Don't ask why Modula-2; I did, and never got a coherent answer.)
2. make the project 'object-oriented'. Yes, using Modula-2. Those who know Modula-2 can already see trouble coming.
3. the only system available to us which had both FORTRAN-77 and Modula-2 compilers was Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop; neither compiler shipped with MPW, they were 3rd-party add-ons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Workshop
I had not used FORTRAN-77 since my undergraduate days. I had never used Modula-2. I had never used MPW. I had object-oriented programming experience, but that with C++, which is NOT very Pascal-like. Macs were NOT the target hardware, the idea was to get something working and then port it to the correct hardware. The logic behind this escaped me.
So I re-learned FORTRAN, I learned MPW, I learned Modula-2 (that was relatively simple as I already know Pascal) and learned how to build an object-oriented system using Modula-2. (About there I worked out why Oberon existed. Exactly why I couldn't use Pascal, when MPW Pascal shipped with MPW and was object-oriented, or C++ when MPW C++ shipped with MPW and was object-oriented, was not explained to me.) By some miracle my part of the project was completed on time and on budget. By which time, of course, management had decided that they really wanted the project done in C++ and the guys who got the completed code got to port it. They had lots and lots and lots of fun, but I wasn't involved except peripherally. i did note that I could have done the project in C++ in the first place. Management was not amused. Neither were the guys who had to port it. I was. The upside was that that I got to work on very powerful, for the time, Macs. I also learned how to write a FORTRAN program in any language. I can still do that, but sadly there's not much need for that skill anymore.
A bit before Alfred (mid-late 80's) I was charged with networking a specialist division of a very large organization. I had experience of DECnet an LAN Manager, and sort of learnt NetWare in a similar way by reading the Red "bookcase" and installing it on a Netware 86 and a 386 server. The organization was standardising on Netware everywhere. After trying it out, and putting it on couple of our networks, it was time to train relevant staff.
I knew that I needed a professional for this, so I asked our training contractor to set it up. A few weeks later I had a room, equipment, and the trainer. The trainer had a set of his company's notes, and the first couple of days went well. The trainer asked if he could borrow the red bookshelf for "advanced training" as the notes didn't cover that, and we could run an enhanced course for our engineers and scientists. I had several copies, and lent him one. About a month later the courses were complete and he gave me the books back. He said that he, too, had wingied it on the advanced course and hoped that it had gone OK, as he had never read them before. I asked him why his employer hadn't provided them - He said that they thought that if their trainers had the books, they would leave and get jobs as expert installers.
A few months later, I was setting up a new department and contacted the training company. They sent a new trainer. I casually asked how the previous trainer was. He said that he had left, and was now working for a medium sized company as their NetWare expert. Apparently the money was much better.
Worked at Novell 20 years ago providing support for the Novell Client. I had never touched Novell before I was hired. Figured out pretty fast I didn't want to do phone support for the rest of my life. Novell had layoffs every year and I decided to find greener pastures before I was told I had to find them.
A consulting gig involving EMC Symmetrix storage on an IBM mainframe. I had (and still have) zero knowledge or experience with IBM mainframes. The guy who offered me the gig knew that, but knew I really knew my stuff when it came to EMC and figured I could learn what I needed on the fly. His confidence in me wasn't misplaced, I had worked a gig for him and had to learn SRDF and (then brand new still in beta) metavolumes on the fly and had no problems, but I was already comfortable with EMC and its CLI documentation was good enough to learn new stuff.
Problem is, I wouldn't have had that 'starting point' foothold with mainframes, it would be a totally alien and new thing. I don't even know how to login or what the command line looks like. Now maybe it would have been no problem either being able to pick it up myself or having other team members around me who were perhaps experienced on mainframes and lacked EMC knowledge so could leverage each other to learn what we lacked. But I decided to turn it down as it could potentially damage my reputation - you never know when someone you work alongside will pop up somewhere else and they might put in the wrong word eliminating you from consideration for a future consulting gig.
I taught myself as I was working the projects.
First one was an ARINC 429 reader we needed to certify some avionics. The new, all digital cockpit was to have no "steam gauges", so we needed to emulate a flight management display which had not yet been built. I told the boss, "Give me a PC, some technicians lab time and development software and I'll build one."
The tech shop wire-wrapped up an ISA card with ARINC UARTs, I wrote the software (assembly driver, Turbo Pascal UI) and it worked.
We had a bunch of new hires, fresh out of college. Probably with better software skills than me. But I was the first to raise my hand. One guy asked my boss why I got all the "cool projects" while they were busy tracing schematics and counting wires.
My boss said (I heard this later), "Paul has been working in the industry for a few years. So I figured he could handle the job."
This guy then came over to me and asked me where I used to work. "The power company," I replied.
"So, what did you do?"
"Just drove around in the county in a pickup truck, pounding in stakes where the crews were supposed to set poles."
He walked away with a rather confused look.
Teaching is a skill ( and an art). It's as much "doing" as is any activity, like writing code or installing software. The fact that those who are incompetent at doing other stuff have been let loose in schools has been a blight on UK education, though these days UK state schools at least are meant to use qualified teachers. ("Meant to" because I know of at least one primary school that uses a Higher Level Teaching Assistant to give teachers their time out of the classroom, and does so by teaching the Science curriculum!).
But teaching ( and training) isn't about slavishly delivering a course. It's about covering the course materials in a way that makes it comprehensible to the students, of what ever age. Knowing the material well enough to explain it is massively important. Knowing how to teach is considerably more important.
In my old age I'm a Digital Champion. Helping people become confident and included in the digital world. Many have never used a keyboard and don't know how to keep themselves safe online. And I quickly got moved from helping in the beginners' group to actually teaching it. Because I can teach, and it shows. I don't always know some bits of the course all that well ( like using You Tube- because I loath it and seldom do beyond pressing the Go button, or writing online CVs- because I'm too old for that malarkey), but I can deliver the course materials, and more importantly can make them accessible to the participants. I know how to explain things, give practical real life examples, draw in other volunteers who may have more experience with that item and so forth.
Oh, and those who can't teach make lucrative careers as advisors, OFSTED inspectors, education officers etc on the backs of teachers. as noted in other places in recent El Reg comments.
I used to consult as a Solaris sysadmin and a PC network/generalist. This was in the late '90s when the internet was a thing but not the ubiquitous thing it is today. Invariably I would run up against a situation I didn't have the answer to, but even then there were plenty of places to find answers if you knew how to look. And since I had a day job, most of my work would be after hours when there was nobody around to see me flailing around for an answer. Get there right before closing, find out what needed doing, then solve the problem after spending time (on the clock) looking up the answer. I was always able to take care of their issues and my clients were happy to pay me for the work up until the day we left the area.
Man, I miss those days.
Being able to teach a course successfully is actually a skill separate from the subject of the course. An experienced educator would have no problem organizing a course plan derived from a curriculum and would find teaching to a already prepared plan child's play. Its the job, and its a particularly easy job when its presumably motivated adults in a smallish class compared to trying to corral and motivate 30-40 teens.
(I'm not a teacher but I'm married to one. She had the sense -- or good luck -- to be a physics and math specialist so her kids came pre-selected and pre-motivated but she's done her time in regular middle school classrooms.)
We were a small regional team working for a large government department writing (mainly) SAS reports in the early 1980s. We had end users who we would help write their own reports using the data sources we had available in the department. Sometime they would be shocked at having to ask the 193cm guy with a mohawk dressed in pyjamas but I was preferable to my scary boss. Eventually this helping morphed into some training material that we presented to our local end users in a hands on session over 3 days. I vaguely recall may have had some trainer training. All good. Then HQ realised they had a problem with SAS end users too. They found out we had been giving training and obtained our material. HQ "training division" would rewrite our material and have people with no idea of SAS present it around the country. Could we "observe" the first sessions in another city? I think my boss refused as he was incandescent about how they had stolen/mangled our material and the idea of "professional" trainers presenting it rather than techies. Anyway, I said I would not mind going to "observe". In those days a freebie flight with accommodation, taxi chits and meal allowance seemed pretty lux plus I had friends in the other city I could catch up with on Department coin. I envisioned I could sit at the back of the class and "observe" and basically lounge around not doing much then go out on the razz with mates. We got the first break with me having to intervene and correct when the "professional" could not understand the foil or nonsense came out or I had to answer "technical" questions. This was every every minute or so. The "professional" trainer was dying and knew it. Plus the punters were getting annoyed at having to swivel around from front to back to listen to me. So he gave up and I took over. That was OK as I'd done presented the material before, knew my stuff and I had brought our original stuff. A bit nerve wracking and draining but I found I was quite good at the training thing. People were happy enough.
Back at the death-knell of the Y2K projects I needed a job (contract rates fell like a stone and I realised that I'd be better off as a permie than chasing a contract in an ever-decreasing market).
So, I applied for a unix and networking job - never having done either commercially (I'd been using linux for a few years by that point so could sort-of drive a unix box). The networking was a bit different (Cisco boxes, packet-switched networks - neither of which I'd ever used).
Much reading and internet searches (back when it was useful) before the interview ensued. I blagged my way through with liberal use of "I'm not sure but I know where to find out" and, much to my surprise, got the job.
It was a good job while it lasted [1] - travel to the various European offices, visits to Paris where my manager was every quarter and, largely, freedom to do the job my own way. I learnt a lot from my manager (all good) about how to be a good manager and a lot from the company about how not to operate an international IT department..
[1] I made it through several of the dot-com-bust rounds of redundancies but then got caught in the end on the premise that "we already have someone in your role in the US so they can cover your tasks". Several months after I got ejected [2], he left as well because they were expecting him to (essentially) work 18 hour days and, even for a US employee, that was too much. Oh, how I laughed.
[2] Our HR manager was away so one of her minions handled it and just gave the minimum package. She came back from leave, threw her toys out the pram and gave me the package I *should* have had originally. One of the few good HR managers I've ever worked with. I ended up with about double the money that the original package gave me. Walked straight out of there into another job.
Done training users twice in the early 90's, both as a favour to a guy who provided hardware so small companies.
First time, two blokes sat back-to-back in a closet on what I think were 486's. The guy on the left was extremely knowledgeable, the guy on the right simply didn't know how to drive a mouse. Total nightmare, customer complained that one guy complained I wasn't teaching advanced stuff and the other bloke complained I was teaching advanced stuff and didn't understand!
Not long after, a 3-hour drive to somebody who had forgotten I was coming and had no interest at all. Called it a day after 2 hours. Never heard anything from the firm that asked me to do the training and I'm sure they didn't pay me either.
Since that time, I have worked a number of times with trainers, from an IT support perspective, and watched them work on their scripts for teaching products they have never used on a day-to-day basis and delivered with such charm and poise they actually sound like they use the product every day, but my favourite thing that trainers say? "Thats an interesting question, I will get to you after this course" - Yer right!
Early 1990s, NetWare - that says either NetWare 3.11 or NetWare 4.0; 4.0 was released in October of 1993, so that could qualify as "early 90s," I suppose. But no mention of NDS (which was the hot new thing with 4.0) tells me it's likely that it was 3.11 or 3.12 (3.12 was released about the same time as 4.0).
There was a niche product called Portable NetWare (aka "NetWare on UNIX") - so *maybe* this is what the story is about - it was pretty niche, though several OEMs built and sold it; it wasn't included with a standard NetWare 3 license. It originally came out in the late 80s - but the installation would've been vastly different from a traditional NetWare installation because it involved installing services on top of UNIX, and certainly wouldn't have been covered in any books about NetWare of the time in any amount of detail because, no doubt, implementation would have depended on whose UNIX you were running on.
Nondedicated NeWare was a 2.x thing, and it shared the system with DOS, not Unix. NetWare services on *nix after "Portable NetWare" didn't become a thing until the "Novell Nterprise Linux Services" (NNLS) in about 2004, after Novell acquired Ximian - and NNLS was superceded by Open Enterprise Server, when Novell's goal was to migrate customers from NetWare to Linux while maintaining the same services on a Linux kernel. And we all know how *that* worked out (I mean, OES is still available from OpenText, who bought Micro Focus, who bought Attachmate, who bought Novell).
ncpfs as a client didn't come on the scene until 2002, and required the IPX protocol module be built into the Linux kernel - which doesn't really help with Unix (though it may well have run there as well).
NetWare/IP was the only solution in the early 90s for NCP over TCP/IP, and it did this by encapsulating NCP in IPX inside TCP/IP; a native solution for NCP TCP/IP didn't come along along until NetWare 5.0 introduced support for it natively. It was one of the big "new features" in NeWare 5.0.
So the only option here would be for our hero to have been running native Unix tools to connect to the NetWare server's file and print services - NFS, most likely. I checked my VM of NetWare 3.12 (because of course I kept one ;) ), and there's no native NFS functionality built into it. There is a TCPIP.NLM module, but NetWare NFS Services was a paid add-on product, and wasn't bundled with anything that would've fit the budget of an individual buying a 5-user license to learn the product from.
I really wonder what the full, real story is. I suspect El Reg embellished this story to make it more "interesting", but as someone who was there at the time, this story as written doesn't smell right to me. I could be wrong (it was 30-odd years ago).
But I don't doubt that someone learned NetWare in the way described in order to teach it. Seneca said "Docendo discimus" - "We learn by teaching." Still one of the best ways to learn, IMHO.
This post has been deleted by its author
Unixware != NetWare.
Unixware was what Novell acquired from USL, and included no "NetWare" services (NCP-based file/print).
Novell announced an *intention* to release something called "SuperNOS", but that never happened. Caldera offered a "NetWare for Linux" in 1998, but plenty of people will tell you that Linux != Unix, and the timeframe doesn't line up with the story here.
I used to support NetWare 4.x, NDS, Unixware, and the clients - at the time this story is said to have happened. I ran Unixware myself on a Compaq server running at home.
The history cited in this story just doesn't line up with my first-hand experience with these products at the time this story is said to have happened.
Downvote me all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the story just doesn't make sense (at least not without further details and explanation/clarification). It was 30 years ago, so it's entirely possible the submitter doesn't remember the details correctly - and that's fine. It's still a fun story about learning something just-in-time in order to teach it. I worked with a US-based CNI who was doing that with the beta of one of the early NetWare 4 official courses.
"Have you ever implemented Alfred's "Fake it till you make it" tactics?"
Guilty as charged.
About 20 years ago I was sent to represent one of our clients as a subject matter expert at settlement negotiations of a technical nature in the capital city of a very warm country which shall remain nameless (because I believe there is still, remarkably, on-going litigation in the ICJ with respect to the matter over which I was sent) but which necessitated about 22 hours of travelling with multiple stopovers required. I took with me enough clothing for a couple of weeks plus a developer's laptop fully loaded with IDE plus source code for the piece of software for which I (team lead for a very small team) was responsible together with beta versions of the other pieces of our corporate software suite.
After 2 weeks, the discussions had run their course and consensus had been reached on the matter over which I was originally sent. At this point, the senior executives of my company suggested that before I started on my return journey, it would be opportune for me to pay a visit to the headquarters of the country's national energy company in order to give them a demo of another of our products -- one with which I was generally familiar but had never myself used for real work and was very far from expert in. I did have the latest beta with me on my laptop.
I spent the rest of that day and a good part of the night rehearsing a canned presentation and running through a set of example problems to make sure they all still worked without any issues on my beta version (just following the recipe: load this data file, set these parameters, run this analysis, display these graphs). By the next morning I could get through it all fairly adroitly, so after breakfast I jumped into a cab with a couple of local colleagues and went off to give my presentation and demo at the national corporation's headquarters. As I set up for the presentation in a small meeting room somewhere in the sweltering bowels of the building in front of an assembled group of a dozen or so senior engineers and managers, I realized I had left my laptop's power adapter back in my hotel room. I should have enough battery power to see me through, I thought (laptop batteries were NiCad in those days; getting a couple of hours out of the battery pack was doing well). Trying to appear much calmer on the outside than I felt on the inside, I launched into my run-through of the software overview and ran the standard examples, getting through it all with alacrity and no hitches in a little over an hour and concluding with a stifled sigh of relief.
And then I opened it up to the floor for questions. "Looks great", they said, "but would you now please load up some of our data files and show us what you can do with some of our real problems?" Oh-oh, I thought, this is where it hits the fan and I'm shown up as a total fraud ... and at that very moment the power ran out on my laptop and it died. To understanding smiles, I made abject apologies for having forgotten my adapter and expansive promises for instant attention to their specific interests from head office, exchanged business cards and shook hands all around, and took my leave. And I was on my way home again that night.
I have never been so relieved to have my battery pack give out.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
