Cramming
The ability to cram is a necessary skill for today's I.T. professional. It is more important than being able to pass a certification exam or two.
New specifications are constantly being published and new devices are always coming to market. The hallmark of an I.T. pro is not only his ability to cram, but also his ability to comprehend and retain. We believe that one can achieve brilliance in the field by delving deeply into core concepts. Examples of core concepts include hardware architecture, RFCs and network protocols. The reader, at this point, will note we are taking cramming rather seriously!
Unlike studying for a certification and regurgitating the answers on an exam, we believe that field experience is required to crystalize the crammed matter (or crammed anti-matter, joke). However, without the cram, the field experience would necessarily result in serial and embarrasing failures. Therefore, the successful I.T. pro is able to apply crammed knowledge to real-world troubleshooting situations because he has to.
Cramming has some negative connotations. It connotes late-nights and lost sleep. Junk food and exhaustion. Enter educational building blocks. Our ace programmer has built his knowledge on a strong foundation. The cornerstones represent best-practice methodologies as well as sound engineering concepts. The mortar of the blocks are the tokens of the languages.
The successful I.T. professional's strong foundation allows the concepts presented in a cram to be absorbed easily, much like a sponge doesn't need to learn about every spill it picks up. Okay, we can see that some more realistic examples are called for.
Take for instance the strange protocol of FTP. FTP is odd in that there are multiple modes and in passive mode, the mode supported by most browsers, multiple communication channels are opened up. Commands use one channel, data another. Communications programmers who have been writing and studying protocol for years remain unphased by the jumble of arrows presented in the cram of passive FTP. They can absorb these concepts like a sponge because there are really no new concepts presented. A protocol can always be looked up. The trick is to be aware that the protocol exists and we learn that after a sentence or two of reading the documentation.
Another instance of a cram may be to learn a new procedural language. How many ways can a language say GOTO or PERFORM or EXIT or IF THEN? The I.T. professional crams up to a certain point, then he grabs the manual and hits the ground running.
There have been numerous forums which imply that the candidate with the most charm wins the job, not necessarily the candidate who is the most technically qualified. If this is true, what's the point of all this cramming?
The point of all this cramming is that when push comes to shove I.T. pros must be armed with the facts and must know where their reference material is and how to get to it fast. We feel cramming plays a vital role in keeping our I.T. pros up-to-date with the latest specifications; we then tell them to go spread the charm.
Gary G.
last updated 10-24-2005
last reviewed 6-1-2006