Subject: Re: Change the subject! RE: [IAOC] Re: IPv4 Outage Planned forIETF71 Plenary

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 07:23:04 -0800

It depends on what you consider the role of an engineer to be. I am a Chartered Engineer. The job you describe sounds more like that of a technician.

Just as a chef knows evey part of the job of a sous-chef and cook an engineer needs to know every part of the job of a technician. But an engineer needs to know more. Like a chef the engineer has to accept ultimate responsibility for creating a dish the customer likes.

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 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Theodore Tso [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent:	Monday, December 31, 2007 06:36 AM Pacific Standard Time
To:	Greg Skinner
Cc:	Hallam-Baker, Phillip; IETF Discussion
Subject:	Re: Change the subject! RE: [IAOC] Re: IPv4 Outage Planned forIETF71 Plenary

On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 05:36:17AM +0000, Greg Skinner wrote:
> FWIW, I reread Russ Housley's comments on the outage, and understand
> it to be an experiment that is voluntary (but encouraged).  Perhaps
> this needs to be stated differently (e.g. "IPv6 experiment planned for
> IETF71 Plenary").

I think the real issue here is the difference between what was
originally stated (I think first by Marshall Rose in the Open Book) as
the difference between the ISO, promulgating OSI, and the IETF,
promulgating TCP/IP --- which was that ISO was populated primarily by
professional standard organization "goers", where as the IETF was
populated primarily by engineers, or "doers".

To the extent that you have developers who are actually helping to
write code and develop reference implementations for the protocol
specifications that one is helping to write, it is probably much more
likely that that population is willing to hack their laptop to run
IPv6 --- even if they have a locked-down laptop issued by the IT
department (which very few engineers I know are willing to
countenance, and will generally tend to work around one way or
another), they can probably use VMware to run a sandbox environment
which they *can* use to experiment.  Note that this has *nothing* to
do with whether the engineer uses Linux or Windows or NetBSD or MacOS
as their primary laptop OS.

On the other hand, if you have professional standards body attendees,
who are perhaps technical enough to talk about a standard, but not
enough to actually implement it, and whose primary expertise is in
politics and the policies and procedures of each particular standards
organization (so they know how to pack a working group or national
body with representatives that will vote they want) --- they will tend
to view their Windows laptop as a production environment as a sealed
box, not to be touched, and only useful for e-mail, powerpoint, and
microsoft word, it is much less likely they will be willing (or even
able) to participate in such an experiment.

Over the years, I suspect the ratio of goers vs. doers has been
increasing; but I hope there are enough doers still attending the IETF
to justify the "Engineering" in the title of the organization.

   	       		     	    	  - Ted
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From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 12:30:44 -0500

On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 07:23:04AM -0800, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> It depends on what you consider the role of an engineer to be. I am
> a Chartered Engineer. The job you describe sounds more like that of
> a technician.
> 
> Just as a chef knows evey part of the job of a sous-chef and cook an
> engineer needs to know every part of the job of a technician. But an
> engineer needs to know more. Like a chef the engineer has to accept
> ultimate responsibility for creating a dish the customer likes.

If an engineer knows every part of the job of a technician, and the
technician can make IPv6 work on their laptop, then surely an
Certified Engineer should have no problems making IPv6 work on his or
her laptop!  :-)

One of the interesting things that sometimes shows up at some of the
cooking competition shows (in particular the recent competition for a
new Iron Chef on the Cooking Channel), is that sometimes by the time
someone achieves the title of chef, they sometimes end up getting
rusty or are otherwise unable to do the job of a sous-chef
competently.  I certainly agree with you that the true mark of a great
chef or an engineer, is that they be able to do the job of a sous-chef
or a technician better most sous-chefs or technicians.  Unfortunately,
this is often not the case.

(They can claim they are simply have no interest in trying --- "I'm a
*chef*, I'm too good to have to demonstrate that I can chop onions
quickly", but I sometimes think that is covering the fact that they no
longer have the ability.)

						- Ted