ginti
Contributor
Philippines most of the time and Thailand and Indonesia. I used to live in Brunei where I did a lot of BSAC courses but that was over 30 years ago and we used to dive in Malaysia back then as well but I refer to dives in the last 2 decades.
Well, if I got it correctly, there seems to be a bit of variation between your and @Centrals' experiences, maybe the diving environment over there is not that homogenous...
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Actually, in my opinion, points {A} and {B} are perfectly satisfied by industry's standards. Indeed, a bit of supervision is very different from babysitting. The point {C} is the crucial one. Indeed, as far as I know, DMs hold legal responsibilities in some countries, which is why I personally believe that they should be able to deal with the few incompetent people they meet.
However, to be honest, maybe I didn't express well myself. I have some experiences with bad DMs, but very very few. Overall, I tend to agree with @ofg-1, despite proudly holding cards from GUE. When I wrote the post Qualifications of a DM I was actually thinking that most of the time DMs satisfy those criteria. Perhaps except for the GUE rec-pass, but as I said there are other ways to determine the minimum acceptable level of skills, and I am nowhere close to the position of judging other divers' abilities: I have insufficient experience and insufficient knowledge to do that.
In general, my view is that the industry relies too much on instructors, leaving them a too wide margin of decisions. I especially refer to the minimum requirement to get the card. Luckily, I almost always met DM who started their training with more experience than the minimum required because, luckily enough, people have on average good faith and don't let too inexperienced divers start the course. But sometimes it happens, and perhaps here there is a bit of margin to improve the current situation.
2 cents from a guy who doesn't feel ready to be a DM
@ofg-1, I guess that with DIR people you also mean GUE divers... well, I hate the DIR word, but as you want. The thing that makes me sad is that you met so many "DIR" people that critical towards others. We are not all like that, really. Especially for rec-diving.
EDIT: I guess this post explain a little bit better also for @markmud and @SlugMug