CompTIA Adds Linux+ Certification

11 platter hard driv writes: "CompTIA (the Computing Technology Industry Association), the people who made the A+ and I-NET+ certifications, have made a Linux certification. I just received an e-mail a day or two ago that the test is out of beta. This seems pretty important seeing how CompTIA is non-vendor specific." Legions of PHBs and Kinko's nationwide look forward to the resulting resume changes.

Comments

Well Yippie

[evilviper]

Looks like the hiring teams no longer need to actually find out how well you know your stuff, only if you have a piece of paper that says you do.

I'm just as happy as everyone else that Linux is getting more recognition, but I've seen too many people with A+, N+, CCNA, CNA, MCP certifications and Masters Degrees in CS, comming to me to actually learn the first thing about computers, to put any faith in any certifications, and I'm quite disturbed by the fact that many employers do.

Does anybody know of any real certifications out there that tests your skills, rather than your ability to memorize test questions?

Yet another difficulty with hiring situations . .

[mjprobst]

Even in the situations where they claim to be testing one's abilities, they're more often testing one's abilities to spit back a memorized answer from one particular system, where a 5-minute period of time with the manuals or actual system, without any destructive actions, could bring about the same result.

I have memory difficulties but have never failed to figure out a *N*X box after being placed in front of it, or in front of its 20' of manuals. Within a week of starting work in a *N*X shop I've always become a valued expert resource for the team, even on systems I'd never seen before starting the job.

But in this economy the smarts in the hiring department were shoved aside, because so much of the boom-time workforce was full of people who claimed "No problem, I can just learn that" without being able to deliver. Right now, those of us whose learning/execution style leans towards pattern recognition and understanding of the architecutre are getting the short end of the stick, because they want to ask a few poorly-worded, poorly-constructed test questions that supposedly boil down everything one would know. I've even caught some of them not knowing their _expected_ correct answer was not _really_ a correct answer!

Of course there are some environments in which this won't cut it. Hiring just _one_ person to be at the head of a support structure for a given vendor's *N*X is one example, that person should have enough background to answer from memory immediately. But even things so simple as filesystem mounting is different between vendors, and in 95% of the cases the differences between in-house policies at different companies are much more important than what particular commands/files are used on one vendor's system.

Nice to see that the problem-solving and architecture-understanding skills have been stomped out of the market, in favor people who can emulate a raw keyword search through a textfile.