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Are IT Certifications Meaningless?
superflippy writes "In his article Hiding Behind Certification, MIT's Michael Schrage argues that CIOs who rely too heavily on certifications as a measure of an employee or sub-contractor's abilities are wasting their companies' money."
here here! by the time you have gone through the hoops and mastered their little quizzes, much has become irrelevant and you are out of touch with the issues in your particular workplace. what ever happened to being able to give a decent discussion to determine what is important in an employee? have management become so out of touch that they no longer know what questions to ask?
Wow, this article finally affirms what I've always known -- that I'm uber-qualified. I have no certifications, degrees, or qualifications of any sort. I am totally 733T! Thank god, I had almost started to believe the nay-sayers.
Oh, and you know how Einstein got bad grades in school? Yeah, well mine are even worse!
He's right. Relying "too heavily" on anything is a mistake. Almost by definition.
There's no certification for being able to handle an akward system administrator who throws a hissy fit every time you misunderstand him but whom you still rely on to gt your job done. It's the people skills that count for a lot more in many ways. Any old eejit could learn how to fix as network. Not everyone can influence the powers that be to get it done when they're not motivated to do so.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
IAALS.
As I am sure many will agree (and say here), MSCE consists mainly of buying the books and decent memorization skills.
I like the idea behind certification, but the costs are way way to high. It's good to be able to point to something and say "This proves I know this", but when it costs over a grand to take the test, It takes the quality of the certification away.
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
Just like the rest of 'IT.'
Am I dead yet?
To paraphrase someone else:
"If you gotta' ask, you ain't never gonna' know"
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As far as I'm concerned the only thing a certification will get you is a job. It looks good to bosses on your resume. But if you're boss was smart enough, they'd know what to look for... which in my opinion would render most certifications meaningless.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
But they certainly aren't sufficient credentials in the absence of any other experience or education.
Any employer who hires someone based on some single, simple criteria, whether that be just a degree, just a certification, or some other buzzword of the week is nearly always going to get less than they bargained for.
Too many people (employees and employers) use things like certificates because they're too lazy to actually do the work needed to either advance their *real* skills or hire someone with real skills.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
That unless you have bags and bags of experience and a lengthy CV, your resume is rarely indicative of your true employable skills. The 8-year old Indian kid who got his MCSE is easy proof of this.
I find some cert courses are good for teaching the fundamentals, rather than proving expertise. I'm studying for a CCNA right now, and while I doubt it'll prove practical for a low level sysadmin job, it is certainly giving me the base networking knowledge required to further pursue a career in network technology...
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Organization certification such as that with ISO 9000 or SEI's Capability Maturity Model forces you into a role where projects you take on affect your certification. I recall one subcontractor who had a CMM level 5 rating; the company produced absolute garbage, but goodness, did they ever produce it so well. They had level 5.
What was especially telling was when we let them go. Their only defense? "But we're CMM Level 5!" They had no idea that process quality was completely separate from product quality.
I just graduated from a smallish high school earlier this month, and our technology program consisted of one class: ROP Computer Systems Management.
Over three years, I had about six different teachers, due to budget problems (in California). The one we had the longest started us on track for an MCSE. Just about everybody in the class got their MCP in Windows 2000 that year, and when I realized how inept a lot of my fellow classmates were, I lost faith in (at least Microsoft's) certifications.
"I can't get my e-mail."
"Why not?"
"The screen's messed up."
"How is the screen messed up?"
"It just went blank."
"Have you tried downloading another graphics driver?"
"How do you do that?"
That's a "Microsoft Certified Professional" talking. Pathetic.
mastergoon@gmail.com
If I interview a candidate for an IT position that has relied heavily on certification, and uses his or her certification repertoir as the one main reason I should hire them, I immediately get suspicioius.
That only tells me that that person needs to go through the traditional courses to learn new things and chances are he/she won't be an ingenious innovator who can improvise good solutions to non standard problems.
So far I've been right.
Every time I've decided to hire a certification trained person (regardless of college degrees) I've ended up with people unable to think outside the box.
I don't want to generalize here, but I've seen the pattern.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
On the other hand, I've never heard of a paper CCIE and that certification has been called "your Doctorate in networking" and I'm told it commands a lot of respect. Still true?
We've had lots of MCSE's apply for various jobs (or CCNA, etc...) However, we've found many bought the books, took the test, passed and expected money to be thrown at them. For the most part, if something was outside what the book covered, they were lost.
MCSE - need to tie accounts on the Unix and windows box together (glossy look as the resist the urge to say "Migrate to active directory")
CCNA - Yeah...we don't use Cisco - stare of disbelief as if I just grew another head.
It's great if you can pass these things, but if you can't apply the knowledge and extrapolate from it, may as well use the certificate as bird linings.
I do a fair bit of IT hiring. Listing certifications on your resume is, in my eyes, a ticket for a one-way trip to the circular file, unless you've got other stuff on your resume to mitigate your certifications. Especially if you're foolish enough to list A+ or other bogus certifications. So, I guess, actually, certifications are valueable, because they allow me as an employer to quickly sort the poseurs out of the pool.
I am a high school student and took a course through a vocational center for Network+ and iNet+ certification. I received 900 on both exams (perfect score), yet don't feel as if I know much about networking at all beyond the basic "this is a Cat5 cable" and "this is how to configure a network interface in Windows." The fact that anyone can get a perfect score, let alone a teenager like myself who does computer stuff as a hobby, shows how meaningless these certifications really are.
This might not be every place, but it's what we tended to do at my old job.
We'd get in a giant stack of resumes. First we'd separate the ones that had the Certs (MCSE, CNE, MS degrees, etc).
Then we'd look at those and laugh at the ones that had no experience but an MCSE or the like.
Then we'd separate the ones who had experience AND the cert, and talk to them. For entry level positions, we'd at least go for the cert and talk to them - but otherwise, experience was king. The cert was just to "prove" that at least they knew something about Novell/Windows stuff (this was about 3 years ago. By the time the company shut down, they were looking at Linux people typically.)
So a cert just tells a potential employer "I know about X". Not that you're any good - we look at experience for that. But it's a benchmark.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I say this every time, but it continually needs to be said: Certs are good depending where you work.
YOU need to decide if they're good for you or not. I work for HP as a gov't contractor. HP could care less, however, the contract's prime contractor and the gov't love to see them, so we get them. And they reward us VERY nicely for doing so.
I could care less about a cert. So can most in the slashdot crowd. However, if it means 20 mins of my time to test on something I already know for an extra $THOUSANDS a year, yer damn skippy I'm going to get it.
to white wash certs all together is just silly. They at the very least provide a baseline from no knowledge to at least some level of understanding of the technology.
Do you think a degree would assist in designing a complexed network architecture model? I doubt it. What about if that same person had certs? Probably not guarenteed, but at least that person has posibilty delt with the product.
And with the argument of certs being "easy" because of brain dumps ect, you get that everywhere, I know lots of ppl that cheated at different levels to get their degree.
The real solution is, real world experience, I'd prefer to employ somebody that has actually done it many times before, then base it soltely on a degree of sorts. Not saying they don't have their place.
I have seen plenty of smart people come out of smart colleges and university. Somehow when they work, they are just lousy.
On the other hand I know plenty of highschool dropouts with certs. They tend to not have as good a work ethic, but they seem to be more knowledgeable.
Best combination are college grads with a degree with certs. Though even I have to admit, someone spending 2 years is equally as good as someone spending 4 years at any school nowadays.
...I can attest to the fact that some clients DO place too much weight on certs. I'll be the first to tell you that some of my certs are valuable and backed by years of experience (VCP - Veritas Certified Pro) while some are the result of cram/pass (CCNA 2.0) or somewhere in between (RHCE).
I've found that being up-front and honest about which of your certs fall into which catagories lends a high level of credability to yourself in the eyes of a potential client/employer. When asked about a specific cert that falls in the cram/pass catagory, I'm brutally honest: "Well, I am certified and I have worked on the equipment in a lab environment; however, the certification was required by my employer so we could resell a particular product line. I can get it up and running solidly, but not off the top of my head..." This was especially true when I used to work in the "channel" (ISVs, resellers, SIs).
I would not fall into the poor attitude of "all certs suck and are worthless"! Proper certs AND documented real-world experience can be a powerful weapon as you try to sell yourself. They can also be a way to get around the gatekeepers to access the real decision makers.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
Some certifications require meaningful knowledge and the ability to prove it in book and lab tests. For example the CCIE certification from Cisco has some pretty tough testing.
I considered going for CCIE in the past, but at that time it was a single test that covered a huge amount of ground. I would have had to learn about DECNet, SNA, Appletalk, IPX, and others. But, it was clear at that time ('95-96) that TCP/IP was the future. So, I didn't do it. I think they now have several CCIE tests, each for different areas of specialization.
But, most of the other certifications I have seen are meaningless. My previous employer tried to send me through various certification classes. They were mind numbingly boring, and I chose not to do them.
In that job, that was no problem, because I had already proven my knowledge. But, I have seen quite a few job listings where they list those silly certifications as desirable. So, you have to rely on the interviewer to be bright enough to assess your knowledge rather than relying on the certifications.
My advice would be to go through the drudgery of the certifications if your employer is willing to pay for it. I wouldn't make it a big part of my resume or anything, but if they ask for it, you will have it.
I was going to reply to this, but I don't have my SCIWE (Slashdot certified insightful writing engineer) certification.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It is especially true in the IT field where 3 months practical experience can very easily be more useful than 4 years of "book learnin'" I don't know how many times I have had to tell "MCSE's" how to perform some basic networking function that should have been covered in week 1 of the course. Still, nice to know their $10,000 hasn't been wasted.
I couldn't find a job for almost 2 years in anything IT or related after getting laid off in july of 2002 from a programmer position. I wanted to get certifications but never bothered because of cost, etc.
:]
Then I started at the Air Products facility less than 2 miles from my house as a contracted security guard for $8.25 a hour. Now I work for Air Products in their Quality department for $50k a year within 6 months.. how did I get there.. I showed them my experience in re-structuring their entire training system.
O yea, IT certs are a joke.
ISO Certification has major problems. ISO auditors don't measure how good your process is. They don't even make sure that you have a process. They just verify that you have a set of documents describing some sort of a process. Now, if those documents don't look right or are not in the proper ISO format, you are in trouble. On the other hand, if you put out a shabby product, and ignore your procedures, they will have no clue.
In one aspect, we can all thank Microsoft for this one with their MCSE mills which turned out a bunch of talentless mouse jockeys. Mind you, not ALL are talentless...but a lot I knew from the boom were. This had the unfortunate effect of taining a bunch of people who really didn't care about much more than dollar signs.
Now, I know a lot of people who have, as a result of articles such as this, let their certifications expire...which I think is a bad idea in some cases.
The problem with certifications is that in many cases they have been overvalued by the people who get burned by hiring the talentless paper monkeys. Unfortunately, certifications are still required in many cases to get through the HR vortex.
However, if certification is used as a minimum baseline of knowledge, it can at least determine a minimum amount of knowledge required. It should be part of a set of tools used to gauge the quality of a candidate, and leveraged by the employer as part of a further interview process.
I'm standing in defense of certifications, partly because I renewed my CCDP and am working on my Solaris 9 certs. Exciting? Not really, but there is still a minimum amount of knowledge required, at least conceptually. To me, it's a validation of my experience that I can at least still learn something. At a minimum, I'm trainable...and familiar with concepts that the application/hardware vendor wants me to know.
Now, for the other tools...it depends on who really controls the interviews. Awhile ago in the network analysis team where I used to work, there was one particularly brilliant hardass. His only interview question was to hand the candidate a dry-erase marker and draw out their home network and explain how it worked, was addressed, and protected. As far as he was concerned, the group needed a net geek, and someone who didn't have their own network at home wouldn't be interested in the job enough to excel. Anyways, I digress...
The hardest test I've taken to date was the CWNA, which really threw me for a loop...and I dread the CWSP which I want to take by the end of the summer.
Take three candidates with roughly the same experience: one has nothing more than a high school diploma, another a college degree, and the other has a 4-year degree and some certifications...HR is likely going to pick the third candidate. Sorry folks...that's just how it is in the business world.
(CCNP - CCDP - CWNA - A+/Net+)
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
it's not so much CIOs as HR departments that consider these certs so heavily. Ultimately, they're worth about as little as college degrees and high school diplomas.
It's a very dark ride.
Yeah, see, I got hired because I hacked their database and made it better, but I kinda left my IPA behind, and they contacted me, and said they wanted to talk. I was scared, but I went down anyways. They said that they'd been trying to figure out how to access their database for months to no avail. And they were actually allowed to. So, they had a little interview as a formality, and then they hired me to manage the database. Tada!
Carnage Blender
I got my A+ certification and CCNA and...
My caffeine-starved brain read that as GNAA. Feck!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
glad to see that somebody other than me also saw the light. Being booksmart or testsmart does not mean being street-smart and most of the time means the opposite, i.e., being totally out of touch with the real world. Hey if there are 24 hours in the day, the time you spare to study for the tests, you are not facing the problems of the real world as we all know real world's most bizzare problems do not make their way to become the certification test questions.
What I love the most out of all these certifications is RHCE (red hat certfied engineer) yeah, somebody study for tests on RH 7.0 about 2 years ago. But, on the paper, they are CERTIFIED. If an employer is giving more value to the piece of paper generated by prometric certificate mill than usnderstanding what I am actually capable of, I might as well stay away from that employer as it is the dead end of the road for me.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
especially in the quickly changing field of IT.
there's no way *any* certificate or degree program can hold a candle to someone driven to learn about topic on their own.
i've been in IT for over 20 years. like most in-demand consultants i taught myself everything. if i had went for some kind of certification or degree i wouldn't have nearly the flexibility and creative opportunities i have today.
not only that, i've seen too many IT people become complacent and mired in some technical backwater. you can't become any expert in IT and rest on you laurels. the minute you do that you're obsolete. certificates and degrees can offer folks the false notion that someone is and always will be an expert.
you want to find a sharp IT person who's going to guide you through the technology minefield? find someone with a consistent history of creative and ongoing IT projects.
all the consultants i know with certificates don't know their shit.
all of the consultants i call on for advice are major self-starters and are *never* certified and rarely have a degree.
certificates, bah!
1. Spend all your money on certs to get a job.
2. Get rejected by anti-cert employers.
3. ???
4. Land a nice job.
Anybody care to fill in the blank?
Steal This Sig
Hiring people is an expensive, crucial process. So managers face a lot of heat when new hires don't work out. Furthermore, we all know that a lot of new hires *don't* work out.
That's why IT certifications can help people get hired. If a manager takes a chance on an "unproven" but possibly brilliant guy with no certs, she's going to have a lot of explaining to do if that new hire turns out to suck.
However, if she hires somebody with all the proper certifications, she can have a) piece of mind b) a nice, plausible excuse if the new dude doesn't work out. "He had all his certifications and gave an impressive interview - we did everything right, but the guy just turned out to be a dude"
For whatever it's worth, I'm a programmer with no certifications. And I think that references are more important than certs, at least in the hiring processes *I've* seen, from both the hiring and the hiree end. However, there's no denying that certifications can be a nice comfort factor as well as be a deciding point between two otherwise-equivalent potential hires.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
What about programming certifications? I know Sun offers different levels of certifications for Java programming. There is a similar one for Visual Studio as well. How do employers/head hunters view the programming ones?
Some certs you can pass if you have even a tiny clue. Others require knowing what you're doing. A small few actually require you to study the studyguide to pass.
Another thing I wonder about is how many of these 'certifications' are just money grubbing. All the people I know that have taken the MCSE were surprised at the simplicity of the test, and surprised at the high cost of the test. Seems like a money grab by (in this example) MS, at the expense (monitarily) of the employees, and at the expense (hiring unqualified workers) of the employers. Now try that stunt with say... Cisco certifications... good luck!
I just recently took the three basic Apple certifications. Now I consider myself an experienced mac user and technician, and from that point of view I'd describe the test to contain 1/3 "do you know what a mouse is?" questions and 1/3 of what I'd consider "knowledgeable" technician questions. The remaining 1/3 were "did you really read the study materials, we're getting picky here" questions. At $150/test, these were still expensive, but not nearly as bad as some others. Unfortunately, although these tests were for service technician certifications, the test questions required much more knowledge of basic mac usage (trivia?) than service, and did a poor job of testing a person's ability to actually troubleshoot and identify problems.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The biggest problem with many of these tests is they are so completely arbitrary and generational. I remember MCSE tests that effectively made you memorize steps to the control panel through the menu & a bunch of other stuff they happily change with each version of windows.
Cisco at least shares some of their working reality (protocals etc...) with their students.
Microsoft puts you a football field from the code, arms length from the issues and tries to teach you temporary solutions. Show me another 'teacher' that won't show you their proofs and tells all your prospective employers you're not necessary because they made it so simple.
Certifications that are an overblown software manual are poor. It should be possible for an information company to distill a central few tests and update less than a third for each software release. The problem is that that would have to be based on fundamental understanding that would crack open their design box.
Proprietary software certification is little more than a golden nose ring. It may lead you to a job but you certainly don't have a huge depth of knowledge after.
ls
...
Yes.
My father-in-law got his MSCE. Guess what he is doing now after having spent the time and money to do that?
Driving a bus.
MSCE at its best.
Certification mills are the engine that keeps teh IT industry running! Think about it. Five years ago when the dot com economy was in full swing, you couldn't turn on a tv or read a newspaper with out seeing ads for some place that would give you some kind of certification in the IT world. Well, where are they now? The economy tanked, and the education mills dried up. If we don't get unqualified people back into the IT industry, it could be years before we see a significent change in the US marketplace. Don't even wonder why jobs are being outsourced overseas. They have the unskilled yet certified labor to fill those positions!
While I can certainly see why certifications can be deceptive, what else is someone starting from the 'zero experience' level to rely on? I graduated with a networking degree just over a year ago. I have no noteworthy related experience other than patching up machines (and setting up the occasional network) for family/friends as well as running a small Linux server out of my home.
95% of the jobs I have seen want at least 2+ years of experience. I'd like to think that the two certifications I have (N+/CCNA) will at least get me noticed for the remaining 5%, and maybe a few of the others as well.
I have met plenty of "paper MCSE" holders in my day, but certification still gets your foot into a lot of doors. I know many on Slashdot may disagree with certification, but my MCSD and various Brainbench certs have helped quite a bit. They especially helped when I only had a couple of years of experience and was trying to prove myself. I don't believe these certs have actually ever landed me the job, but I strongly believe that my certs have helped get my resume to the top of the interview stack. Its pretty hard to get the job if you cannot even get the interview! Without some ability to interview and prove your technical knowledge, your cert is worthless. The same can be said about some Bachelors Degrees I have seen. While a technical trainer I once taught a comp sci grad student that did not understand for-loops. This girl had a BS in CompSci. In her case, I think the BS meant something else. The sad thing is her degree was from a reputable university.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
HR still has the same problems as before, weeding through the large stacks of resumes to find the best person for the job. Nothing new here.
*waves hand in air* This is not the informative article that you were looking for. You can go about your business. Move along, move along...
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
- Where do you see yourself in five years?
- What are your greatest strengths/weaknesses?
- Why do you want to work here?
How can you tell if the interviewer knows what she/he is doing? If you get a form of the following question:Q.E.D.
Yeah, right.
This is an excellent point, but is it so wrong to evaluate a candidate's attitude and drive just as much as their aptitude? In my experience, I've seen better results from hard-working, honest people than from very bright, unmotivated jerks.
Do certifications mean someone is more motivated? Well, I'd say that it's a good (but not infallible) indicator, and should be evaluated along with other factors.
Here's a stab at what might also work:
evaluating Certifications, degrees, and so on.
seeing how well candidate gets along with potential peers (a la group interview)
score on a mental alertness (read: IQ) test. Yeah, it's Orwellian, but generally speaking they are a good indicator at your capacity for abstract thought.
And my experiences were superbly ironic. The first interview was with a client tech. guy who did a rapid fire 20 questions and probably ticked-off the list he had. I had just been technically interviewed and rejected because I did not know answers to certification questions.
In the afternoon I was interviewed by a tech guy from another department of the same client. Same rapid fire 20 questions and a couple of dodge answers (I learn fast) and I was recommended for the job.
Bizarre! Between the two interviews nothing changed except an increase in my cynic meter. I used my certification as asswipe long long ago and recommend the same for everyone.
Science as a way of life.
many CIOs increasingly look to certification and accreditation standards as "market signals" indicative of professional quality and reliability. This represents the laziest and most dangerous kind of cover-your-ass thinking by C-level executives.
That's the point of the article. Idiot liar cheats fucking over good candidates with subjective criteria for disqualification while hiring the other blow-dried liar cheat who happens to run a company which employs "certified" programmers.
I'll guess this particular form of "fuck you" employment practice has probably cost 10 million qualified people good jobs recently. Makes for a great community when everyone has to move 100 miles to find work every few minutes.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
HELL no! Anything that will get you past the HR goons and on the the hiring manager to really show your knowledge to ain't half bad.
Consider the money you spent to get a cert to simply be interview protection money.
For one, I'm sixteen years old and entirely self-taught in computers, and I'm quite adept enough at server administration.
For another, here's what I think: Any hacker can do any certified admin's job, and any hacker can do it better. I suspect that often times, people who just learn the technical skills and miss out on the culture of computing and the Internet fail to "get it," fail to see the beauty of Unix and good design. (And you-know-who, proprietor of the title of MSCE, likes it that way. But I digress.)
I have little experience with actual certified admins (that which I have had has evidently been negative), so this is all speculation, really, but I consider it good speculation. If you can't appreciate the art, how can you master it?
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
I am proud to say I don't have a single certification. No MCSE no Oracle DBA, or any of that crap even though I probably know more about Oracle than most DBAs and more about Microsoft than most MCSE's. OTOH, I have written software that's received the industry's highest honors and awards, and developed Internet-based systems that are used by millions of people each day.
I work for my own company these days, but I often wonder if I decided I wasn't subjected to enough sadism (I routinely watch "Office Space" to reaffirm my life choices) whether or not I'd be "marketable" in today's job market, whether or not having degrees and certifications would be more important than a lot of productive, world-class real-world experience.
Maybe I can afford to be more arrogant about this, but I really wouldn't want to work for any company that only cared about paper-based qualifications. I have faith in my experence, my track record and my ability to convince others that I am the right person for the job.
That notwithstanding, I do recognize that there is an absence of means by which "computer people" are qualified as being "certified". There are times when I almost wish there was the computer equivalent of a Bar or CPA exam, just so I could fly through it and distance myself from the large array of hacks that rip off people. But in the end, I think paper is worth little more than its weight... in paper.
I have never used "certification" as a qualifer when hiring.
I have never been certified and I earn a decent living (6 figures USD) in the software biz.
Q.E.D. (that's Latin for something or other that means "duh").
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I was going to get A+ certified (even bought the book), but I found out I already knew most of the stuff in the book. I never got around to it, either. This was back in the day of Windows 95/98, which seems like ages ago. I'm 17 now, so this was back when I was 11. I've found the most practical 'certification' is experience; the more experiences you have, the more knowledge you have, the more you know how to fix things. In regard to A+, does it really matter if you can memorize all the POST errors? I haven't... usually the bios throws out a string of what's wrong. Of course, I learned some things from the book, and perhaps the certification is only to guarantee that you know (or knew for the test) the material covered. Although I haven't really fixed computers in exchange for money, most people that I know recognize me for my ability to fix computers, even though I don't have any certifications. I can understand why this is important (possibly) for corporate environments (a guarantee), but having it is mostly usless from an application/practical standpoint.
The main issue is that they describe something you did in a different job, for a different boss, in the past. Now you're trying to get a new job, for a new boss, in a new company, in the present/future. Past performance is no indication of future returns. Period.
Yeah, right.
My boyfriend and I are barely living about the poverty line. Some really good months when I get extra hours at my day job, and the fast food place I work at on the side needs me to cover an extra shift, and his customers feel like actually tipping him for delivering their pizzas, sure, we can squeeze into the very lower middle class, but usually we're scrambling to just pay bills and eat well. And even for the breif moment we are in the lower middle class, all that usually means is buying new black pants and white undershirts and socks because they're ripped and have holes.
What does that mean? It means that neither of us have $150 per class to even work on our gen eds at the community college (I could hardly even fit a class into my two job schedule right now.) We certainly don't have $500-$1000 to pull out of our asses to get MCSEs, MSCDs, and whatever else wants to be the cool certification this week, even though both of us could certainly pass if we bought a book and bought the software. Spending just $300 each last summer to get A+ certified about broke the bank!
But there's the other trick to breaking into the IT "industry." We need to keep our software current. An MCSE and MSCD would do both of us some good, but how can we do that when all I own is a Windows 98 SE liscense and all he owns is a Windows XP Home liscense? Neither of us can certainly afford to shell out the money to get Windows Server 2003 so that we can get experience.
It's a vicious cycle. Both of us are trapped in crap jobs because we don't make enough to educate ourselves to even get considered for interviews for better jobs that would pay enough that we could keep current. A lot of good both of our excellent GPAs from high school did us. Employers won't even give me a chance to show them my coding skill, and they won't give my boyfriend a chance to show his administration skill.
In the end, it's a plug for free software. I could kick some ass as a developer if an employer needed someone to code QT, but no one uses QT. Somehow people got on the bandwagon of shit that is Win32. Now, if you want MySQL skills, sure. SQL Server 2000? Dream on. Even at my day job, my boss refuses to upgrade from 6.5 since it costs too much. Visual Basic .NET. I'd love to. They all tell me it's finally become a real programming language. Too bad. I'm stuck in Visual Basic 6 at my day job for the same reason.
It really doesn't matter to employers that I have the methods and attitudes that produce good products. All that matters is that I threw money at some college to give me one piece of paper, and then I threw money at some other business to get more pieces of paper.
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What nobody seems to acknowledge is that a cert lets the hiring manager off the hook if the employee doesn't work out - "The guy WAS certified, it's not my fault!". And in business, everyone is just covering their asses.
13-year-olds can pass the test.
I'm sorry, but that means that no actual thinking goes on. Nobody can put together multiple complex concepts to do much of anything at 13.
Degrees are nice for certain things, but have become the litmus test for so many professions especially IT. When in fact, so many guys have been too busy coding and fixing networks and upgrading systems to go out and get a piece of paper that says they passed a test on things that they've been doing for years.
Peace
...you haven't won the lotto by then. :)
Yeah, right.
On the other hand, MSCE certification was a good indicator for me. If someone had acutally paid to become a Microsoft puppet, and expected extra preks and pays and status for it, it was easy to decide that I would not hire them
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
And why is it under Developers? But that aside, some certifications are meaningful, and some are not. A clueless manager (one who can't even be bothered to read the free industry publications for example) won't know the difference, which degrades the value of all certifications, but you don't want to work for a shop like that anyway, right? You want to work for someone with a clue.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My company is a big [VENDOR X] shop. We have an internal '[VENDOR X] help desk'. This is comprised of first level employees who have been through [VENDOR X] training and passed their [VENDOR X] Systems Administration test. 100% [VENDOR X] Certified Employees. They're tier 1 ticket-takers who answer the calls, do some minor lookups for tickets, toss the tickets around, track things, and generally play go between. Little to no hands-on real-world experience, and their training decays quickly from lack of use.
The tier 2 employees? Tier 3? Many had some form of [VENDOR X] training years ago. The last time the company authorized training for most of them was in either 1999 or 2000. Most are not certified. The vast majority (especially after rounds of eliminations over the years) are very competent and some even quite excellent in their technical knowledge.
The company only minorly encourages the Tier 2 and 3 employees to get certified. The Tier 1 certification is required via contract with [VENDOR X] as part of their agreement.I think this pretty much spells a company that knows that certs are meaningless. Clued managers don't look for certs. But there certainly are some organizations out there for who certifications are everything.
[VENDOR X] used to allow plausable deniability that we're talking about any vendor under the sun, and not one in particular. Apologies.
While a certification may get you a job it will be your hard work and knowledge that lets you keep it an gain the experience.
True, many people with certifications don't know what the should. That's when you show up with the same cert, do a good job and make them look bad. Your employer (or consulting firm, in my case) will that much more impressed with you.
Who do you think they'll call for the next contact.
*Note* Would those who have gotten certs only for the money please change careers. You're degrading the value of certifications. Thanks.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
I used to think that certifications might be somewhat useful, but then I had to rescue a gaggle of Certified Types who had misconfigured an ethernet network... breaking the 3-4-5 rule, which was actually directly part of their certification training.
Eh? So much for book knowledge...
Its great. And funny at the same time. We learned about the quality manual and all of that jazz enough to pass a test. This is to feed the customers who want to know about our certifications for when they're reviewing us versus another company. Of course, they basically made the entire system so where it is the same as what we're actually doing today, just there is a big formal documentation process around it (that is not specific at the points that would tie someone down to something).
The result? Instant corporate wide certification on a quality assurance methodology that didn't actually require anyone to do anything different but create some initial documents and have everyone be able to answer questions about them.
Great stuff. And certified by a well-known outside auditing firm, too!
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for the MCSE certs, but Novell's CNE program really started it as far as I am concerned. For years, a CNE meant a lot more money on your paychecks. Admittedly, the CNE was also a difficult certification to get compared to MCSE, but it was Novell and not Microsoft that set the ball rolling in the first place.
I use certifications for personal goals now. By the end of this year, I want to get MCSE:Security, CCNA, Foundry's baseline cert (can't recall it right now, but we are a wholly-Foundry shop), and start in on GSEC, and eventually I plan on having a few others, including CISSP. I'm not using them for pay boosts (well, not primarily), but as guideposts, and the material I have from work does a good job of structuring things in layers so that I learn it all the way through.
I already know that I know more than the certified people at work. Most of the people there that really know their stuff are CCIEs -- and anyone with that gets my respect. There's one guy that's a CCNA, CNA, and MCSE+I (I actually had to look that one up to find out the Microsoft still allows it to be used), among other things, and he's a dimwit who gets a lot of really basic things wrong and is a constant source of annoyance to many of us. One day, my alphabet soup will not only be thicker than his, but I'll actually have real responsibilities, unlike him.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Marijuana, Mountain Dew and My MCSE
Y
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s
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. . . you are in management and do hiring and firing. Here's the truth of the matter: if you came up through the ranks - - and I did, starting with PC support - - then, by the time you're the one making choices about who joins your team, you know how to do the interview. You make the candidate write something to make sure he can spell and put a sentence together. You talk to him for a little while to make reasonably certain he is not schizoid. You have the criminal background check done to make sure he isn't a fugitive. And then, you give him a practical interview with maybe 20 tasks to perform on a workstation and/or server. These tasks range from the obvious to the arcane. If things look good after the practical interview, you have a serious chat about how he got his education and where he wants to go with it. The words "self taught" always ring loudly. Certs may enter in to such a conversation, but, from what I've seen, the hungry guys and gals who love computing have a glow to them that the money grubbers just can't fake. This is how it has been for me, and I have hired only one disaster (drug problem) so far. I'd be curious as to whether other IT managers would share this point of view.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
About three months ago I came very close to landing a fairly decent job. The manager of IT wanted to hire me even though I don't have an certifications. Unfortunately he wasn't able to bypass human resources and their prerequisite that all new IT employees have certifications. This guy spent nearly three weeks trying to get them to bend the rules. HR took the position that people have to be taught everything they know and since I don't have any formal IT related education or certifications I couldn't possibly know what I'm doing.
Simply put, they do not understand that people with motivatin can be self-taught.
In a lot of companies all that matters to HR and corporate types are certifications and degrees. You must realize many times the people making these decisions are the ones that had to be taught how to right-click.
I see a bunch of folks in this thread talking about how certifications and education are worthless, because they're quickly obsoleted in the fast paced, quickly changing world of IT. I call bullshit. Most certifications are worthless because the cert's exam questions become compromised rendering the test invalid. The people running the GMAT manage to put out a new test every thirty days, I don't understand why MS, Novell, and Cisco can't do the same thing.
For that matter, I've never understood why people are happy to post their "braindumps" of memorized exam questions on the Internet. The people you're feeding answers to are the same people you're going to be competing with for jobs. You're flooding the same market you want to compete in!
I've been in the fast, quickly changing world of IT since 1993, and for all that's changed, many "tried and true" tricks still work. They might need to be updated, but the concepts are similar. For example, suppose back in 1994 I had a bunch of identical machines I wanted to configure quickly. I'd pull out the old laplink cables, pull out my special floppy that would copy the disk from my working configured "master" to the "clones". In 2003, I use a network and Ghost software, but it's pretty much the same. In 1996, I made a firewall with a floppy disk and an old 386. I needed a router in a pinch a few weeks ago, and I made one with a bootable linux CD.
In IT, understanding a few basic concepts will get you a long way. Until earlier this year, I'd never touched Windows XP - we hadn't used it at work, and I have Macs at home. But when a few Windows XP computers showed up in the office and on customer's desktops during support sessions, did I throw my hands up and whine, "Omigod! The fast pace of the quickly changing field of IT has obsoleted my skills and left me behind!" No, I didn't - I applied what I'd learned from previous Microsoft operating systems and *I* *figured* *it* *out*.
If you took someone off the street and taught him Windows NT 4.0 inside and out, then gave him a computer with XP or Server 2003 on it, it's not like he's going to be completely lost because the tech blew right past him. He can take the skills he's already picked up, and apply them as he learns a new system. Same thing with certifications. If I've been using and am certified on Netware 4 (and I mean CNE-level, not a CNA), then I'll probably be able to get the hang of Netware 5 pretty quickly, even if my certificate doesn't say so.
A certification, or any sort of technical training is valuable if you learn its main lesson - how to think when looking at a particular manufacturer's products. If you think the goal of the certification process is the piece of paper, you've missed the whole point. The problem with most technical cetification testing programs is how easily they can be "gamed". Someone who's learned what's really supposed to be taught by the certification process is invaluable. Someone who's memorized the answers off a few dozen braindump sites will be near useless.
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I just finished interviewing and doing follow-up email ( this last part got me the job! ). There were two interviews, in the first one I met my potential future coworkers. They checked my experience, asked a few light technical questions, and then I was scheduled to interview with the director of the IT Solutions dept. Well, I was expecting a simple interview where they would check me out for corporate culture fit, but instead I was given a hypothetical enterprise network management problem, and told to explain how I would solve it step by step.
I did this by drawing my solution on the whiteboard and then later coding a bit of it on a piece of paper. I walked through the psuedocode part and then explained/justifyed each line of the actual code. It was very grueling experience, and at the end the director told me what he liked and did not like about it. The next day, I did a follow-up email to the interview, filled in the holes in my earlier solution, and the director called me back almost immediately after I sent the email, telling me that it was an awesome solution to the problem.
A few days after that I was told I had that job...
Lesson learned - Experience, certifications, and schooling can get you in the door, but be ready to be put on the spot once you are in there.
I have seen people bs their way into technical jobs and on the strength of their certs/degrees, but I don't think that really works anymore. Companies run lean and mean these days, so they try and get the most for their money.
Anyone else have a different recent experience?
I can't afford a sig!
Many years ago I was a corp tech support person. One of the strangest duties that I had was to assist local store manager interview potential store techs. She would start and ask the regular HR questions and get a feel for the person in general and I would talk to them about their technical background. After the interview I express values of good, bad, and BS.
One the high end we had a gentleman that had services F16s in the airforce. I had to explain to the store manager that while we were not likely to have people tow in jet aircraft to fix, his experience meant that he could probably learn whatever technical skills we needed him to learn. He unfortunately was not in our price range . On the other end was a gentleman that had fixed *boilers* on merchant marine vessels over the last 20 years. I later had to explain that this was largely mechanical repair and he might fix printers but I was skeptical.
I helped interview a wide range of people and it was always interesting. And yea, I did get to filter a fair share of b---s---.
eric
It all depends on what companies you're going after.
Fortune 500 companies are run like you say, full of HR staff who can't tell a valid candidate from their ass, so they latch onto some kind of meaningless benchmark like a piece of paper which, in all reality, means that individual spent a crapload of money to get that piece of paper. In other words, they're hiring out of the good ol' boy network. New money, old money, you're hiring the upper crust.
Small companies can't afford to have that band of incompetant fratboys running things, they need their employees to actually get work done. They can't afford to hire the George Bushes of the world, otherwise they'll be out of business in no time.
This is, IMHO, often why small companies go under - either they start out strong and then a fratboy manages to get in a position of power who calls in a bunch of his fratboy friends and they drown the company (unfortunately not by holding keggers, all joy left their hearts a long, long time ago), or they start out with the wrong mindset, hire a bunch of these boobs, and then go under, - and quick.
Me, I'm in the games industry. Aside from EA and one or two others, there's nothing approaching an HR department like you speak of. HR usually equals a single person, and if they're even smaller (usually the case), hires are directly handled by the CEO, or if they're a little bigger, department heads. These people rarely have a Harvard degrees and has learned their lessons the hard way about who can pull their own weight.
Or, at least, these people do at the places I get jobs at. The past is littered with companies run by boobs who went out of business by hiring more boobs (John Romero's side of Ion Storm, f'instance, had it's share of boobs - and I don't solely mean that one Level Designer / Romero Squeeze / Plastic Surgery Test Monkey).
I've been working as a software engineer for a little over a decade now, having held many lead/hiring positions, and I can tell you, with all confidence, that certs are about as useful in the real world as an associate degree (or your average CS bachelor's, but that's a whole different story). They merely demonstrate that the receiver took a few weeks out of his or her life to memorize enough material to pass a multiple choice test. Whoopee. And I don't mean Goldberg.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Whatever. We all know it's the person that makes the job and not the "qualifications". But that doesn't matter for shit in the real world. If I don't have a certification (or possibly a degree from Harvard, as the article would have you believe) how does that make me any more or less qualified for the job? It certainly doesn't help to not have a certification.
And for the record, I don't have any certs. All I have is a college degree. But I sure as hell wish I was an msce (bet this had a +5 insightful until the microsoft part)... it would make me more marketable in the long run.
MCSE Certification
In my experience, which obviously doesn't mean everything, certificates have nothing at all to do with how well someone understands a topic, or how well they will perform a job. Further, in my 8 or so years of professional sysadmin (meaning that's how I make my living), very few of the other sysadmins I've met, in relatively senior positions at other successful companies, have had any certificates to speak of, other than the odd certification their company made them go get (Firewalls, etc). I've met one with an MCSE , however, he obtained his MCSE becuase he was in a slump, quite a bit older than average, and needed to stay on top of some new stuff after coming out of a fairly long, routine syadmin job. He didn't at all think he knew it all.. he just used it as a good refresher (which it can be, if you already have some knowledge to start with)
Education is good. Certification, if you view it as education, is not a bad thing.. the danger is when certification, and the organizations issuing them, lead you to believe that they are VERY important, and that once you learn what they have to tell you you will be an expert, at the top of your game. You will not.. you will have proven a very basic level of technical knowledge that is somewhat revelant to the modern sysadmin.
Having certifications is not a bad thing.. but acting like your certifications are what make you valuable to a potential employer is not.
IF you already have several years of real work experience, certifications are not something you should really worry about.
...and the two high school kids in front of me in line were both bragging to each other how they'd aced their MCSE exams after studying via flashcards.
As a hiring manager at the time, I remembered that and didn't make it a requirement when evaluating candidates. I was more interested if they'd done a similar type of work and what their approach to solving different types of problems might be.
Ironically enough, I'm now in search of a job - and even as a former manager type - can't get past the door without the 'certs.
Just amazing.
"Your customer service skills and commitment to service really don't matter.... if you're not an MCSE or MCP, etc." - words directly from an HR person here in SF.
To have ambition was my ambition.
...and the capabilities required are not likely to have been tested by the certification exams, not even likely to be found together in an individual not already at the job.
We had to fill several positions for Java programmers lately, that in addition to Java programming required learning Server Side JavaScript (an ancient language) and touching many script written in that language. We wrote a custom Java/HTML/JSP exam that the candidates had to take. The exam tested what we thought was required for the job, and left out what we didn't care about.
We hired three people who passed the exam. One of them had taken several Java courses and his CV was pretty impressive, but he had an awful programming style, bad variable/class/method naming habits, an excessive inclination for using complicated OO design patterns, and an *unbelievable* tendency to misunderstand everything. We eventually lost patience and had to fire him, and trying for find a replacement we found out that in addition to the exam, it was better to interview the candidate and give him a ver brief OO design excercise that he could solve in private, but he had to explain the solution verbally.
The ability to understand a clear statement of the problem that he had to solve and the ability to explain his solution are as important as the knowledge of OO design principles in real life, and the former are unlikely to be tested by certification exams. Plus, if you criticize his design, to get to see how he reacts to criticism, which he also will have to take in real life.
I am an undergrad and will have my degree in CompSci in 2 months. About two-thirds of my fellow students cannot write a simple class in ANY language, won't even think of doing anything in Linux (fear of a console), and can't even create a HTML table without assistance from a refernce book. Freaking amazing... yet I have a few friends who fit this description and still have several certifications.
I will soon have to compete with them, thus I'll need to get more certifications than the next guy. The PHB doesn't know the difference between a good admin and the other guy with lots of certs on his resume.
I got hired into a Java/Oracle shop after learning PHP/MySQL, and spending just a few hours doing the Java tutorial.
:)
In the first few months, I scrambled hard to get used to the new language, tools, etc... Certification gave me a clear learning path, and showed the boss that I had the right attitude. I also learned the Java API inside out, and actually became much more productive... it's amazing how many people code for years in Java and don't know that there's this handy-dandy java.util.Properties thing in the API! Someone had duplicated it, so I refactored it, made it faster with 200 fewer lines to maintain. (In fact, I erased more lines than I wrote; my productivity that year was probably a negative 7-10,000 lines, )
When my trial period ended, I got a raise. 3 months later, I was almost done certification, and I got another raise. They had to lay me off after a year, but one of the two clients I did work for offered me a position, paying 5k Euro more- I wouldn't have been on the client projects if it weren't for the fact that I was certified.
I'm now self-employed, and when I sent out resumes, the certification helps me get an interview (I don't have a degree). It might prove I can jump through hoops, but it also proves I at least know my API.
Any HR person that relies on certs alone is an idiot. Disregarding them entirely would be stupid. But if you are on the other side of things, certifications can be damned useful
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Whenever I get an email with a sig like:
Bob McWorthless
Technical Field Representative
MCSE MOUS CNA EIEIO
I know the guy is gonna be useless as tits on a bull. Lot's of folks I work with have certifications. None of the competent ones put it in their sig...
Those that can learn on their own
And those that must be trained and tested.
You, unfortunately, fall into the later, and THAT is whats wrong with certifications. As you yourself articulated, the hardest interview you ever had was what those in the former category would consider the EASIEST. If you truly are an IT person, you don't need some silly piece of paper to prove your skill - you can simply convey it by talking about yourself, and showing that you learn on your OWN. If you are another of these papermill creations, that has to be sent through training to learn your IT skills you are of NO USE. The market and technology changes too fast to accomodate people with certs that need to be trained, and that is what the author of the article was really dancing around.
We live in a time when its not enough just be someone that can be taught how to run a Cisco box, how to configure a sun or install patches on a Windows box - you have to be someone that learns extremely fast and enjoys the process of change. Ergo, the interview that you dredded, show me your home network, is possibly the best way to know if someone is truly qualified for any IT position. No certification on earth can prove that someone has genuine raw talent and enthusiasm for their work. At its best, it just shows you can take a test. Whoopie. Show me what you can DO and how well you do it.
Certifications are a joke. As the old saying goes, what do you call a doctor that graduated from the worst medical school on earth at the bottom of his class?
Doctor.
Would you want that highly certified doctor working on you if you had a choice?
And yet I can't seen to stop collecting them.
I've worked with brilliant folks who couldn't pass an exam to save their lives. I've also, unfortunately, worked with a few "Paper MCSE's." Experience is all the matters in the end.
The best they are good for (as others have already attested to) is to get past the clueless HR people and schedule an interview.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
My employer uses it as bragging rights to prospective customers (i.e., "75% of our engineers have a CISSP"). So it definitely isn't meaningless in that context.
I haven't yet seen any direct benefits from having it, but then again, I haven't been looking for another job.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
I have several certifications and I am (was) a certified trainer for Novell and Microsoft.
The key to usefull people is experience and certification. There were two things I saw with self-taught technical people:
first, there were gaps in their knowledge that came from being able to do things without understanding exactly what they're doing or the underlying technology. I did this to myself when i first hooked up two windows nt machines together and wondered why they didn't see each other. They would be properly setup but i couldn't browse to the other. i would get disgusted and go get something to eat (or do *something* else). when i would get back, presto, it worked! later when i was reading the microsoft courseware I came to understand the timing of the Browswer server and how it worked. So *training* helps fill in the gaps of knowledge. *testing* demonstrates that you have been paying attention at least a little. and *certification* demonstratates persistance.
The second thing that I noticed was that self taught people could not see their lack of knowledge. If there was one thing that I started out all classes with it was this: I can teach you what's in this book, but the most important thing to learn is where this book takes you after the last page. I could tell pretty early who my good students were because they took what was handed to them and pursued it farther.
I have passed about 70 of these test (most needed to teach a class), and have sat a large number of classes as a student. One of the things that I am proud to say is that there were very few useless classes (or test) that I studied for. There have been an amazing number of times where little details in a novell, microsoft, or cisco course have helped me fill in the blanks to solve a problem.
eric
Certifications are no longer a shield that the HR department may hide behind. No longer can they simply respond "she/he had the certifications" when an employee has proven themselves to be less than adequate. Your employment prospectives will follow suit if relying on such a mechanism. Proven worth will make you desireable and indispensable.
But then again, its never bad to have some paper behind you if your trying to break into the industry you desire.
Also worth noting is that I am biased. Veiw this comment as non-factual and opinionated. Also, all systems level hirees go through me at my orginization.
When I must interview a prospective person, I will ask them questions that they have no hope of answering. I am interested in their learned tactics for figuring out the answer.
all of this for the problems you will face in everyday life will rarely be textbook.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
besdies MCSE's who else would I make fun of at work?
I taught a college course on general PC maintenance, building, etc. There was an MS engineer in the course. He needed it for the degree. He knew #$%^. He failed the course. Where I work, we take certification to a short degree and then experience, or prove what you know, and go from there.
I know CCNP's thta know less than I do, and I had a CCNA. I did not have time to renew. Working on *NIX boxes now a days more than ever before.
As I have always said %$#@ certifications.
It isn't CIOs who created this trend. It's Human Resource professionals. How many HR people do you know, people with a background or a degree in HR, that you would want to be stranded on an island with? And discount the cute ones who are hot. Answer: none.
. Think any of these guys have certs? I doubt it. Think they need them? No.
Why? It's because they are trained in the art of evaluation and discipline. They couch it words like training and development, compensation analysis, etc. But it's about deciding how to hire people, how to fire people without putting the corporation at risk. Very few, if any, lead any efforts toward team building or fostering leadership. That's just crap on their resume.
I went to a seminar hosted by my state on technology. They had sessions, I went to the HR one just for kicks. They had HR people from a major carrier there, and the questions were big softballs like "what do you look for when hiring people for hi tech jobs?" The answer made me want to puke. "We look for people with something extrordinary on their resume, something that sets them apart from the crowd. Extra volunteer work, to show they are community minded." Bull and shit. They look for certs. They don't know any better, they have no clue how to distinguish a solid technical candidate from one that knows a bunch of acronyms. There is big big money in the IT training industry, so they fold and defer to the "system". In many cases, if these are jobs online such as Monster or something - submissions are run through filters that weed out any resume that doesn't have the right letters in it.
This has an interesting effect. Really smart people who don't want to run through cert treadmills almost never fill the ranks of corporate button down places. Consultants from places like the Big 5 and "big name" IT consultant places are, in my experience, uniformly idiots who are hired because they are sheep and will get the certs and sit in cubes and be good little boys and girls. Really bright people go to start-ups and work in small, dynamic companies and network personally at conventions, and set up website SHOWING their skills. Most of them don't hold any certs, and wouldn't want to. Many of them come from top university programs, in the states those would be Cal-Berk, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. And some others.
Take a look at these guys in Bucharest doing a submarine game (http://www.silent-hunteriii.com/uk/dev_team.php)
I took a crappy first-level phone support job and began taking cert exams. Lots of them. I passed all the NT4 MCSE exams in 2 months (while working, no classes) and then started on Cisco and Compaq ASE.
They served to get my foot in the door for the interviews until my resume filled out a little more. Once you're in there, they don't mean diddly. Only good communication skills and experience will get you the job offer. I think they are sometimes more important than any degree or cert you can put on your resume. After all these years I've still never been to an interview where they didn't offer me a position.
Now that I have 3 director-level posistions on my CV, and am running my own company, they're less important. I've let most of them expire simply because it's not worth the time invested to keep taking exams to prove that I haven't forgotten every thing that I know. When asked I simply say "I am or have previously been certified in "Blah Blah" and that's usually sufficient.
And for all of you who are in my position, having good skills and experience, but no sheepskin - I explain it this way:
I graduated high school in 1988. If I had gone to university and attained a bachelor's in CS, I would've graduated in 1992. State of the art technology in 1992 is largely irrelevant today, and the only thing that would have been proven by that degree is that I could finish what I started.
Most PHB's who have heard that have agreed and I have even been told that having the confidence to say that was one of the factors that lead to the offer.
Just my $0.02.
I'm in the process of getting a BS in CS, but have never really had any experience with any kind of certification. So I saw the section at Barnes and Noble and decided to take a look. I found one of the few Cisco books that wasn't part of a package and it looked pretty tough. I haven't ever dealt with any of that before.
Then I proceeded to look at the A+ certification. After flipping through the book, I almost laughed. It seemed to me any normal person would pick half that stuff up just dealing with computers on a daily basis. Hell, it had tests on some of the Setup Wizards in Windows. That, to me, it pretty crazy. The only hard seeming part was it actually had questions on what options were shown in this particular pane of the Wizard in this particular situation. Why the hell do I care? I can read it when I come to it.
Now please, if I'm missing something, inform me. That I'm almost willing to shell out the cash and go for my A+ cert without looking through the review guides or whatever.
Blake
As someone who is currently applying for (and mostly getting rejected from) IT jobs that "prefer" certain certifications (of which I have none), I might be a bit jaded, but this is my take on things:
I'm in good standing with my current employer and could probably even get a fairly significant promotion soon, if I wanted to. Unfortunately, external circumstances require me to relocate a couple hundred miles to where this will be impossible. From what I've seen of A+ certification, there's quite little on the test that I couldn't find with 15 minutes, appropriate manuals, and Google. I have the experience to know when to check the manuals and Google, so the only penalty is taking the time to do so, which I suspect many people with A+ certification revert to a month after the test anyway. So, if I were to go get the certification before applying to more jobs, that would simply be more time that I'm unemployed and out of touch with the work.
I think I'd learn a fair amount from an MCSE course, but the last place I actually got an interview, which said it "preferred" MCSE and actually meant it, clearly has little use for that kind of expertise, and made it clear that they were really interested in my experience in a nearly identical environment. Apparently the MCSE preference was an artifact of HR, even though it's not going to be a very significant part of the actual hiring decision. HR at this (and many other) organizations seems to be acting as a gatekeeper, with qualifications for certain job titles coming down from on high, rather than the departments that actually want the employees.
I've actually helped people study for CCNA, and while I think it's worthwhile stuff to know, it really seems to be overkill for many of the jobs that want it. It's got a reputation as being the 800 pound gorilla of certifications, so asking for it for jobs that are not 800 pound gorilla jobs will result in attracting people who are overqualified, who will leave for better pay when the economy picks up, or people who are overtrained and underexperienced, who will be really slow to pick anything up.
Given the screwy economy at the moment, some shops seem to be hiring a few of these overqualified people to manage overtrained, underexperienced minions, in the hopes that the minions will be experienced minions when their superiors leave for greener pastures. In organizations that already have a base of stable employees, this seems to supplement their workforce nicely, but in new organizations the result is disastrous, since the overqualified managers have been out of the trenches for too long and the overtrained techs haven't been in them for long enough.
Hopefully, this situation will stabilize when the economy does. In the meantime, I'm having to look for work in cities other than the one in which I will be living, since I have to go 25 miles away to find a place where the HR department is even referring my application to the department that wants me, and I have so few connections there to get a lead by word of mouth, which would be effortless where I currently live.
I hate commuting.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
"Meaningless Credentials Supporting Egos"
...how people lay down such importance on qualifications. Some of the most skilled and technically minded people I have met have had no university level qualifications, or at the very least none in the IT field. Yes, it's nice to be qualified in certain aspects of a field, and it looks good on paper, but where does it really get you? I mean, I'm sure MCSEs have been hired for administering Unix systems before, just for having some generic IT qualifications...
If you read any books like "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", or "Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government - Saving Privacy in the Digital Age" by Steven Levy, you tend to see that *many* of the real pioneers of computing (and cryptography) were either people who didn't care too much about their actual studies and dropped out of university, or never went there to study in the first place. It's not to say that you don't *need* higher level education, but that example tends to imply that in many cases, people can get on just fine without it.
...that they have a budget to educate their employees and a person who is certified would be one of the first people they hire but if you tell them that you want training to get certified they won't help you.
I think they're afraid that once certified, you'll seek employment elsewhere. Totally screwed up.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
MCSEs... I get tired of hearing them say, "I only know Windows."
If an applicant shows you his/her certifications first, move on to the next person. If you have to ASK them what certifications they've received, move them to the top of the list, because they're not relying upon their alphabet soup to get them hired!
"The truth--as we all so bitterly know--is that the IT world is filled with certified, credentialed and accredited idiots."
I was amazed that candidates with networking-related certs couldn't adequately answer basic questions like the difference between shared and switched Ethernet, or the purpose of a subnet mask. Eventually it got to the point that I was less likely to consider a resume that had certs listed prominently compared to a resume that had no certs at all.
There are two attributes that I found were most likely to result in a successful, productive hire:
- Good interpersonal skills. Sounds trite, I know, by in my view IT is a customer service position. You should enjoy helping people, not get riled easily, and be able to talk to them on their technical level without being condescending. Candidates with successful experience in front-line retail sales (department stores, automotive shops, etc) often downplayed this element of their work history, but I found it to be a positive indicator of a "customer service" mindset.
- Self-motivated technical experience. Many people find it hard to break into the IT industry; that's fine - what did you do in the meantime? Build a home network? Put together a PC from components? Try other operating systems? Do volunteer IT work for schools, libraries, churches, friends & family? Great. Write some software of your own, esp. OSS? Even better! I found that the candidates who explored and learned new technologies just because they thought it was cool made the most capable employees when it came to integrating diverse systems and solving odd problems.
So are certs a waste of time? Not necessarily. My perspective is specific to a startup environment, where everyone needs to be able to do a lot of different things. Large companies often use certs as a filter, though, and if you don't have them you might not even get in the door.Plastering your certification logos across the top of your resume is unlikely to impress anyone who is competent technically. You can still mention them, but make sure to have plenty of evidence of actual doing in addition, even if it's not formal job experience.
Yes.
Actually, I think most certifications are considered worthless because many people who get them memorize information to pass tests (they don't have to get it off the internet-they can use the test materials). I imagine few people fall into this category:
"Someone who's learned what's really supposed to be taught by the certification process is invaluable."
Hell, I know more than a few college grads that have difficulty thinking and learning. Why should people with certs be any different.
A cert that is based on regurgitation of information is fundamentally worthless. It measures the fact that you spent X amount of time and Y amount of money, no more. People who rely primarily on this information for hiring decisions are idiots. Of course, you might have to actually LOOK at all of the resumes you get. OH THE HORRORS. In the end, you have to actually INTERVIEW people to find out if they are qualified. OH MY GOD, THAT MIGHT TAKE DAYS, I mean we are only hiring a person that can screw up our company and paying them a lot of money. But if there is no penalty for hiring bad employees (but he had a lot of certs, education, etc.-it's all CYA for bad managers) it won't change....
1) The certs mean nothing. In all honesty, a cert means you passed a certain level on a test- which means you know terminology and proper coding, administration, etc. It does not mean that the developer in question is a good one in the sense that he'll mesh with your team, writes good clean code, etc. All it means is he/she can pass a test with the way things are done right now.
2) See 1. Your idea of a test is no different than making people get certifications with the current scheme. It's not going to help you much.
How to fix things? Your guess is as good as mine on that one, but what you've espoused isn't it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I got a job as a 'Computer Operator' at a small community bank. During that time, I did all kinds of stuff. This includes, but isn't limited to, setting up an entire Ethernet network (they were beginning migration from some sort of serial/token ring thing when I joined), along with working in operations, printing statements/checks, doing wire transfers, mopping floors, couriering, etc.
I applied for a Network Administrator position at a very large credit union. I have no certifications, only years of experience (of course long before small community bank I was messing with DOS/Win/Linux/etc).
Long story short: I got the job against 150 applicants. Why?
Why did I beat out so many of the finalists, most of whom did have certifications?
Well, the answer's obvious, isn't it? Experience beats a piece of paper every day of the week.
I'm not saying that certs are worthless, but experience weighs more on the decision, and is taken into consideration a bit more, than certs.
I feel very fortunate to have the job I do. I suffered for four and a half years as the bank lackey, and it paid off.
And, if the certifications are listed first on the resume, thus indicating that the applicant thinks they're important, I immediately toss the resume into the reject pile.
I also worry less than most about whether the applicant has much experience with the language being used. I've hired C programmers to write PL/1, and vice-versa.
Instead, I usually jump quickly to the job experience, or other areas in the resume that will give me an idea of the applicant's character. I am usually looking for someone who shows pride in their work, and who takes initiative and learns on the job. The questions I ask on the interview are aimed at the same thing.
Most of the project managers around me consider my approach to be strange, yet I am almost never disappointed with the people I hire this way, while the other managers seem to have to deal with a constant stream of highly-certified, yet essentially incompetent individuals.
Most MCSEs are in it for the money. Nothing wrong with that but frequently you end up with someone who knows only the company line and can't think of anything but a single vendor solution.
Case in point: Our illustrious IT folk are replacing our trusty Linux mail server with an Exchange server and since Micro$oft products are so sturdy, they're locking IMAP and POP behind the firewall and we now have to VPN in to read our mail.
What's wrong with a SSL/TLS connection to a properly configured Linux box? Oops, I forgot. They're scared to death of the command line and are phasing out our *NIX servers.
this sums up the whole discussion, as far as I'm concerned.
personal anecdote: I majored in cognitive psychology because it interested me at the time. I worked as a paralegal then taught English in Prague. after travelling, loafing and eventually running out of money, I took a job as a "web developer" with no formal training whatsoever. in the ensuing 8 years I've taught myself html, javascript, css, xml, java, sql, jstl/el, become an expert in configuring apache (mod_rewrite in particular), struts, tiles, the http protocol, content management systems, release engineering and software configuration management... etc.
In this 8-year career so far I've never been out of a job, I've earned a healthy paycheck, I've done extra well-paying consulting work on the side, had as many as 8 people reporting to me in a technical managment role, carved out my own career path and currently work from home as many hours/days per week as I like (I find 1/2-time is the right balance for me). On the whole I've been very happy with my career and my choices. And this is without a technical degree, without a certificate of any sort. I read, I do, I learn.
When I interview candidates I often ask them to solve technical problems for me on the spot, or to tell me their thoughts on web standards, or simply to defend their choice of browser. One thing I *never* do is ask about certification.
granted this is a rambling anecdote, and there may be certain cases where a cert. helps open the door... but not in my experience.
ok enough.
g'night all.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Certs aren't worth the paper they are printed on. A few years back I was working in a Novell 3.11 and 3.12 IT department. There was 3 of us and none of us had a CNE so the owner of the business decided that it was time to hire a CNE instead of sending one of us to "school" for CNE. One was hired. And, I kept going behind him and correcting errors. I got tired of this so one day I saw a major mistake in the config file. So I decided that I would take a long weekend -- the company owed me several weeks of comp-time -- and left my pager on my desk and left town. I was back in 4 days and the server was down for 3 of the 4 days. I knew what the issue was but took about 20 minutes (I could have fixed in about 5 but I didn't want anybody to know that I knew that there was an issue with the server before I left town.) The owner determined that having a CNE wasn't such a good idea after. All a cert means is someone took the time to spend allot of money on classes without any real world experience. No piece paper can replace actual hands on experience or OJT. There are book smarts and then there are those who have the natural ability to make the computer do what we want it to do. If I was hiring an IT professional, I would take someone with 20 years of experience without certs before I would take some with less then a year of experience with all of the certs.
CMM is about process and only process, relying on you to get your process just right to ensure product quality- but it's NOT about product quality in and of itself. I discovered this when they started doing all the initial audit work for CMM at one of my previous employers. CMM is just another vain attempt at trying to make software and network work be just like manufacturing. Sorry boys, just doesn't work that way and may never do so.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
As the old saying goes, what do you call a doctor that graduated from the worst medical school on earth at the bottom of his class?
Doctor.
There is also another saying... If the bare minimum wasn't the bare minimum, then it wouldn't be the bare minimum.
Would an employer rather have a network ace than a trained guy for the same price? Absolutely--of course he would. Would that same employer keep a trained guy on the payroll that returns his worth in pay? Again, absolutely--your assumption is that every employer has unrestricted access to a bunch of talented net geeks.
I'm not saying I'm disagreeing w/ all of your post, but to say that all certs is a "joke" is a gross overstatement.
G-Force music visualization
Let me put this as direct as I can (for a Funny moderation; WITH THIS TITLE).
Yes!
Yes, they are meaningless. I have CNE, MCP, A+ and Network+. They are totally useless, 2 weeks fixing PCs full time will better educate you then the A+ ever could.
CNE like the MCSE assumes that the system is always functional, it tells you what button to push to do what. Concepts, technical underpinnings, or similiar areas arn't covered in any more depth then a 30 min program on discovery channel.
When I was around grade 8, I picked up the A+ book on a friday, wrote and passed both A+ exams by the following thursday and didn't touch a computer during that time. I hadn't even used a computer for much other then games before that either. Like everyone else, I learn how to take tests and mentally pair up meanings for the multiple choice exam.
Certifications are not certifications, they are products. You don't earn your MCSE, they just make you think that, you just purchased it.
Multiple choice exams are useless. Now that I am older and wiser, I realize that any certification that doesn't require at the very least a lab test, isn't worth the paper its written on.
> ...have management become so out of touch that they no longer know what questions to ask?
There is a saying:
"First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people." (Leo Rosten)
An incompetent manager is more worried about covering his ass than getting the job done right. Thus he will hire based on credentials. That way, if things go wrong, he can say that it's not his fault, because the hiree met all the qualifications.
It's "curiosity piqued," so you know.
I think the idea is that one has their curiosity aroused, not made to stick up quickly. While this other term and its applicable sense work in a way, they're at least awkward and it's certainly not the common phrasing you attempted to invoke.
(In case you were prone to a GSF2 reaction, please know that the idea behind correcting this error is neither schadenfreude, nor domination, nor glory, so relax.)
I'm a 3rd year IT major and something that one of my professors stressed to the class last semester was that he could teach us PHP, SQL, Web Services and such but that would be useless in the long run. Instead his goal was to teach us to be self-sufficient, to be able to find our own answers and teach ourselves what we needed to know to accomplish a given task. I think I learned more in that class than any other, not only the skills I picked up but the confidence gained from learning it on my own, not to mention the fact that I didn't have to sit and listen to a professor drone on about syntax and loop logic (like my comp sci programming classes).
I just hope that when I graduate that capacity to adapt and learn on my own is sufficient to find a position "in the field" as they say.
This, my friend, is life.
Look at it like this...Doctors, Lawyers, Accountants, etc, all have to pass some exam to become certified.
Does that mean they're all knowing? Of course not. You still have to shop around for a good doctor, accountant, or lawyer.
IT certs are no different.
i've been a *nix system administrator and network administrator at my little university for almost two years now. i got a CCNA in high school after studying for it my junior and senior year. did it help? kind of. such concepts as OSI model (yes, i know of the group who says "wow, you said OSI model, you must be leet") do actually come in handy for troubleshooting networks from the bottom up. the cisco/novell-specific part of the curriculum has thus far been pretty much a complete waste for me, except maybe operating zebra on my ipv6 router (i'm trying to persuade the school to adopt it), since it closely resembles cisco's own IOS. while at linuxworld new york 2004, i saw a redhat certified guy come up to the gentoo booth and ask them some silly stuff. he said that he was a network administrator at buffalo university(!), and yeah, he seemed like one of those people who could do stuff on the exam, but not much aside from that. i think certs are a lot more useful if they teach concepts which can be applied to everyday network/system/whathaveyou administration instead of vendor-specific stuff. but then again, one ca nargue the vendor-specific stuff is what makes this system go round.
I replied quite simply that if said future employer didn't want to hire someone that was working as a lead SA at Sun when that person got the certification, I'd highly question the talent that they hire...
I am about to enter college to study computer networking, and am wondering how slashdotters that are in-the-know, think of my plan/situation:
I have just recently graduated highschool(this month), and have finished 1/2 of the CCNA(v. 3.xx), I have 2 internships, 1 a 9-month(school year) desktop support intership troubleshooter high school staffer machines, printers, etc. The other, a 3 month(june-august) that I am currently in, is a networking intership with the school district's VERY competant Tech department, including cable management stuff, Avaya switch and layer 3 config at the Avaya CLI, etc..
For college, I plan on going to the comm. college's network degree that offers a CCNA, CCNP, Cisco WLAN and Cisco Security(yes, an associates that is based on Cisco classes, i know). I will be eligable to take all those tests, with reasonable assurance of passing.
So I will be a Networker, with about 1 years experience, with as high as a CCNP, and some limited but hands-on experience with Avaya equipment, as well. If I want, in the next 2 years(as I attend the community college's program) to get myself to be 'more attractive' to a potential emploter for being a networkin admin, or similar, what should i focus on? Part-time intership, passing the cert tests, getting non-networking certs as well(A+ and Net+ would not, I am told, be difficult for my knowledge, though studying would be required)?
Any suggestions on what you would want me to do in the next 2 years, so that I would be more valuable to a future employer?
For your standpoint to be true, the people that do the interview has to have at /least/ the same level of knowledge in the field as you do.
In allmost all the interviews I've been called to or been assisting at, the one who actually decides doesn't have this knowledge. It's not his area of proffession, so he doesn't need it.
So he looks at the persons certificates and see that this person *should* have the required knowledge, talks to him/her to see if he/she has had any previous experience, etc, and to see if he/she fit into the corporate culture. If the position requires knowledge in, say, compaq fibrechannel solutions, a person who isn't a certified compaq fibrechannel technician isn't even called to an interview.
So, no, a certification doesn't show your knowledge, but it is essential it you want a qualified work.
Even if you're the worlds best surgion, you won't do one damnded operation, legally, if you haven't got an exam.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
However I worked for 14 years in the industry and didn't get a single certification until I started working in technical education a year and a half ago.
I now hold LPIC-1, CNA6, and CDE certifications.
Based on my experience before and after having certification, I have to agree with the large numbers of posts here I've read that say essentially that certification in and of itself is pretty meaningless unless the test actually requires practical knowledge. I consider my CDE to be the most significant certification (even though it's discontinued) because it required that I actually sit down and fix a broken system.
The problem with certification, as I see it, is largely an economic problem.
In order for companies to make money certifying people to perform a particular task, the tests have to be easy enough to encourage large numbers of people to try to attain the certification.
This is all well and good in the scope of the certification business.
But for those who have received the certification, the certification holds more value if there are fewer people certified.
Look at the valued certifications - CCIE, CISSP, and yes, the CDE as well (there's only about 1,000 in the world and won't be any more because Novell killed that program off). These certs have very specific value because (a) they are relatively difficult to attain, (b) few people take the tests because the tests are actually *difficult*, and (c) you actually have to know something about the subject in order to even think of taking the test.
I used to work with a CNE who blew smoke out his ass on a regular basis - it was really embarrassing, because anyone with any sort of technical background knew that he didn't have a clue what he was talking about, but he could present his ideas in a way that sounded convincing to the uninitiated.
I also worked with another CNE who had no clue how to even make a bootable diskette. Used to be that you couldn't get the certification without that fairly basic piece of knowledge.
My advice to anyone looking to get into the IT industry is this:
1. Learn to write code. If you understand how software works, then you can *really* excel in this business - because when the system breaks (and it always will at some point), you'll have the skills to understand what's actually going on inside the machine and stand a much better chance of being able to figure it out.
2. Learn to troubleshoot a problem. Programming helps with this, but if you cannot effectively troubleshoot a problem, you're going to be pretty useless in the IT business. This means being able to look at a problem and dissect it logically, break it down into component parts. From a programming standpoint (should you choose this path), this means understanding how to debug code properly - displaying and following variable values through the flow of the program, using breakpoints, and other such techniques. It amazes me how many would-be programmers don't even think to print the value of variables at various points in the program - they're SO damned focussed on the end result that they don't think they can vary the output of their program during the development process.
3. Learn something about electronics. Computers are electronic devices, so learn something about electronics at a basic level. For one thing, this will help you with troubleshooting software because most electronics classes have you troubleshooting electronic circuits.
4. NEVER EVER ASSUME YOU KNOW EVERYTHING!!! You don't - and can't - know everything about a technology. There is ALWAYS room to learn more. That's one of the things I love about working with technology. Those who claim to know everything are either deluded or lying - and it really makes it difficult for those of us who DO actually know an awful lot about a particular technology.
Anyway, when I showed up for my interview, the boss, who is a sort of layman nerd, the kind who reads Wired magazine and thinks he knows everything about computers, but who has about 150 adware and spyware programs on his Windows box that runs slow as molasses, that all he uses it for is checking his Hotmail account, asked me what certifications I had. Well, I had none, and that's what I told him. I think the interview ended abruptly at that point. I didn't get the job.
But the story gets better. As it turns out, I am a half-distant friend of this one guy who works there, and about six months later, after they hired someone with about 50 certifications, my friend told me that this guy doesn't know jack about schitt. They have so many problems there, it's not even funny. And it's stupid, obvious stuff. I mean, come on! I know I could have done a much better job there. Even another friend of mine, a machinist who doesn't give a rat's ass about computers, set up a complete network inside his company, where every job is referenced to a database that he set up. Hell, this guy knows so little about computers, he doesn't even know his administrator password to modify the database, so it's been the same way for years and years... but it gets the job done. No certification, no knowledge of anything... Sure, if it were hooked up to the Internet, he'd probably have the whole system h4x0r3d up faster than he could say Jack Robinson, but he knows that he doesn't know jack, so he has a single "Great Quality" PC hooked up to the dial-up for emailing customers. If he could do all that without knowing schitt about jack, imagine what I could do for the company that wouldn't hire me because I didn't have all kinds of glossy certifications from fancy companies.
Oh, the end of my story is that I finally got a job at another small business, actually an indirect competitor of the first company--same general business, but different market segment. When I got there they had 3 computers, and 1 printer. When someone needed to print, they'd wheel the printer over (it was on a cart), hook it up to the computer, and print. If all three needed to print at the same time, you had two people standing around waiting for a 50 page piece of crap the other person was printing to finish... What a waste of time! Now, they have 24 computers, including 4 servers, with a nice company network, a professional website, everything stored in databases, automated backup, and I'm continuously working on ways to make the most of our computational resources to better serve our customers, our sales team, and the employees inside the company. Still no certification though.
Certifications and Degrees are worthless in the real world. In either case they will learn more in the first year actually doing the job.
My observation (mainly to the Asian communities, but probably holds true for the rest) is the guys who hold the a lot of certs (MCSE,CCNA,A+....) /degree (multiple master of whatever management) are mediocre, in terms of both technical and people skill. Getting through a pile of these things is a good indication the candidate has an attitude to climb up the ladder. But, on the other hand, they just want to do that all by the book. Creativity, novelty, real initiative, crisis management etc are not their strength.
Let's talk about the other bunch, some sysadmin (engineer, accountant or whatever professional) get no futher accreditation after the most essential one. They tend to run towards two extremes: extremely keen on the job and the certs are too easy for them to take that seriously; extremely lazy and don't want to do anything....
Really that's mediocre vs extremes. C{E/F/I/T}Os pick whatever you like depending on what you need.
I used to interview incompetent individuals who pimped their certifications with nothing to back it. Oddly, I'm considering following the same path. Why? Because with the tight job market and the realities of an established workplace. There are some truly impressive developers out there, but there seems to be a lot more arrogant developers who are incompetent at their jobs. And they are judging the relevance of my experience? I'd like the option of getting a certification, instead always depending some jackass who thinks expertise in a subject involves reading half of a Software Developer article about a common sense practice and fucking it up. So yeah, I hope certifications get even more prevalent in order to lessen the dependence on years of experience and questionably skilled senior folks. I'd rather have a guy who has two years experience and a desire to learn than a guy 10 years of incompetent and unstable programming.
as i look for a network administration job, almost everywhere i see MCSE + CCNA desired, and often required. Nevermind my degree in computer engineering from a top 10 engineering school.
They may have little practical value, but they seem to help get your foot in the door.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
I think that a journalist who begins a paragraph with "Sorry, folks" should perhaps be more concerned with their own credentials and skills.
Yet another beat up about nothing much. Journalism at it's finest.
Of course, you might have to actually LOOK at all of the resumes you get. OH THE HORRORS. In the end, you have to actually INTERVIEW people to find out if they are qualified. OH MY GOD, THAT MIGHT TAKE DAYS
Imagine you are a manager looking to fill a position for a company in Silicon Valley. You post the job online or whatever, and in the next 2 days you get around 1000 applications. If you could read each resume and interview each candidate in 15 minutes, that means that all you could do for around 31 days (assuming 8 hour workdays (1000 * 15)/ 60 / 8 = 31.25) is interview.
Of course it depends on the position, but most managers do not have time to iterview more than 5 to 10 candidates, so they screen applications. How do you screen applications? Buzzwords, degrees, certifications.
Some cretifications are worse than others, but if you make a blanket statement that all certifications are worthless in all cases you are full of shit. If all certs are worhtless, how can college degrees be worth anything? If you can't rely on a college degree as an idicator of something what can you rely on? Some bullshit a candidate told you in an interveiw? The paper tigers everyone complains about who got jobs because of their paper also got lots of experience they could bullshit about too, so can you always trust job experience that someone puts on their resume?
Certs do matter. How much depends on the cert, the certified, and the position. However, I think author of the article points out that many CIOs are using certs as the only criterion, which is obviously stupid and lazy.
Networking is still the best means for candidates to find work and for the hiring to know enough about the candidate to make a reasonable decision.
I keep my A+ certification card in my wallet. Sometimes when I visit a user's desk, I hold my wallet up next to my face, exposing the card, and say in an Agent Mulder deadpan voice "A+ certified technican. I'd like to ask you a few questions about your operating system."
There just isn't anything harder to do than to hire a good employee, period. Harvard's business school did a well-funded study not that long ago that showed that interviewing job candidates selects for worse candidates than if you chose people at random from the incoming resume file. Why? Because what you're selecting for when you interview employees is for people whose primary job skill is being interviewed. Similarly, unless you're hiring people to take multiple-choice tests all day, hiring them based on their ability to pass multiple-choice tests is likely to produce worst results than hiring people at random. But you don't see any company in the world hiring entirely at random, do you?
Anybody who's in the position of making hiring decisions knows that no matter how careful they are, some percentage of the people they hire aren't going to work out. That's unavoidable. So for them, vendor certifications serve an all-important purpose. Certifications shift the blame for bad employees onto the certifying authority. "You said that the new guy you hired would be competent in Technology X, and he's a total idiot!" "I didn't say that he was competent in Technology X, the company that certified him said that he was. How was I supposed to know that they were wrong?"
Last time I checked, there were 2 required tests within the MCSE, then you had to take a couple tests from a menu of several, and then a couple from an even larger menu.
This leads to freshly-stamped MCSE's knowing Exchange or SQL Server or security or IIS, and so on. Need someone who knows Exchange inside out? An MCSE might be your person -- or might be utterly useless.
UNIX admins, by comparison, are generally expected to have a reasonable amount of proficiency in all areas and uses of the system, usually with particular strength in one or two.
("You're a UNIX admin? You're the bad guys, you keep things running." - An MCSE to me on our way out of a consulting firm where we'd both been interviewing.)
Sometimes you would be surprised by how much you can get for so little. For instance, our local library has a nice computer lab running Win2K. That's a good place for you to get access to a Win2K machine. While you are there, checkout some of the Cert study guides. Total cost to you so far: $0.
Also, while you are in the lab at the library, lookup the listings for all of the technical user groups that meet in your area. This is good for so many reason:
- Lessons on latest technology
- Network with other users
- Find out about job openings
- Free food (usually pizza and pop)
- Door Prizes
I live near a major city, and there are literally hundreds of groups that meet throughout the month. If you find a couple of small groups, you really increase your chances of getting those door prizes. Plus, you might luckout and meet someone who will give you a shot at a better job.All of this for the cost of transportation. Not bad if you ask me.
But certifications? To me, a certificate such as MSCE and the like are a good indication that someone feels the need to make themselves look better than they are. Take your certifications and shove them where the sun don't shine--let me see some working solutions you have created. Not just on the job, but what have you done in your own time? I'd be far more interested in hiring someone that, on their own initiative, learned some topic at home and developed something based on that knowledge which demonstrates knowledge and ability in the field than someone who has a certification which means they went through the motions to get the certification.
Experience and examples of past work are gold. Just about everything else is Monopoly funny money and checks written against empty accounts. That's not to say that everyone with ceritications is an idiot, but I'm immediately skeptical of anyone that would mention such a certification prominently on their resume.
Unfortunately analyzing past technical work and accomplishments are beyond the capability of most HR departments.
Take: Satanist & Dancing Shemale off of your website, or don't mention your URL on your resume. I think you may be scaring potential employers.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
MCSE:Security... I was trying to come up with a punch line for that, but it pretty much holds its own.
I have one semester left in an A.S. level Computer Networking degree. All of the tech classes are not knowledge-based, but instead each class is a preparation for a certain certification. I always found this to be stupid, and the proof of the matter is that probably better than 75% of the people I've had in every single class were there just to get the certification and move on. They could give a shit if they actually learned anything or not. That's why I never bothered to get my certifications. I got my MCP for Win2k Pro before I went to college, but ever since then I've passed on taking them because they seem worthless to me, based on the average kinds of people that are taking the tests. However, the only advantage of taking certification-driven college courses is that on my resume, I can say that I took the courses for the MCSE or CCNA certification (or whatever it may be). This way, on my resume, it looks like I actually got the certifications even though I did not.
Fortune 500 companies are run like you say, full of HR staff who can't tell a valid candidate from their ass, so they latch onto some kind of meaningless benchmark like a piece of paper which, in all reality, means that individual spent a crapload of money to get that piece of paper. In other words, they're hiring out of the good ol' boy network. New money, old money, you're hiring the upper crust.
This isn't the complete picture. I have a friend who works in HR at a very large corporation. I commented on their "scoring" system that weeds out a lot of people simply based on experience-based questions for each position (ie. "do you have a bachelors in ____, do you have experience with SAP"). I told her a lot of very good people probably won't score in the top 10% that they actually look at.
She said that of course, N*ke wants the very best person for the job. But each position may have a between 100 and 1000 applicants. Even if they simply cut the bottom 90% based on their score, they feel reasonably certain that they'll still get someone who be able to do the job very well... even if the best person was in that 90% they didn't consider.
It's kind of the like the decision-making problem of "value of perfect information". When making a decision, you try to evaluate "what would the outcome be if we had 'perfect information' that would give us the absolute best outcome". You then figure that you'll have a certain probability of a "good outcome" and determine the cost for that. The difference in return between your reasonably assured "good outcome" and the "very best" outcome is the most you should be willing to pay for better information.
In the case of hiring, you could get near-perfect information by individually interviewing all 1000 applicants. But that would cost quite a bit more than interviewing only the top 10%. If you interview the entire field, what are the chances that someone not in that top 10% will bring enough value to the company to compensate for the much higher costs from interviewing more people?
It's a gamble, and a successful company finds the right balance.
I have a couple of certifications (SCJP, MCP), and I'm working towards a couple more (MCAD, MCSD). My perspective on the certs is to use them to verify that I have coverage on a subject. I had three years experience with developing java apps before I took the exam. I decided to take the exam because I figured I could easily pass it. As it turns out, it was a lot tougher than I expected, and I learned quite a bit going through study guide. The same is true for my VB and C# certs.
I don't look at the certs as a way to get a (better) job. Instead, it is just a way to show that I have coverage in a particular subject. I don't imagine I'll ever make it my selling point, but if the job requires that particular skill, I have the means of proving that I am adept in it.
Many companies won't consider candidates without certs, even though they know they get certified deadwood more often than they get talent.
I have met a grand total of two MCSE's in almost 5 years who had any skills whatsoever. Both of them were good before they took the certs -- the certs were just so they could get their foot in the door for contracts.
I have never asked anyone about their certs in an interview. I have never hired anyone who thought their certs should impress me, nor recommended that anyone be hired on basis of their certs.
In fact, I specifically prefer to recommend those who've bootstrapped their skills by learning on their own. They'll be far better able to deal with learning the business environment than someone who can memorize the right answers for a cert, but who has never learned how to think about the use of technology.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Ive been working in this industry for over 10 years. currently i work at a university where i was the only one with actual Field experience in what they needed. now the school is trying to hire me ( I'm currently a consultant) and all i hear is that since i don't have a bachelors degree they may not be able to pay me what i want. the fact that i have 10 years real world experience doesn't seem to matter.
i was midway through college when i got a job at foundation health doing what i wanted to do. at at a higher pay than i would have if i had a degree. and the fact is that a degree or a certification means nothing until your at the bargaining table, and someone with the imagination of a gnat uses it against you.
Sigh, and you'd also probably call some wacko who sets up practice with fake diplomas in Miami doctor too. Certifications, tests, degrees, etc. measure knowledge, skill, and so on according to professionally agreed upon standards so any arrogant know-it-all like yourself can't claim to be something they're not.
I totally agree with you there. I sat the solaris exam just recently and it was so easy to pass it wasn't funny.
One of the good things it did for me though was make me aware of just how easy it was so the next CV that comes across my desk for a UNIX admin who only has Certifications but no real experiences I am not going to consider for anything other than a tape monkey.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
Is for Mr. Schrage to come along with me on my job interviews and explain these things to prospective employers....it seems about 50% of them actually put stock in these laughing....stocks....
I don't think they realize how many courses there are out there that teach people to memorize the big stuff, pass the exam a couple hours later and thats that....meanwhile a week goes by and they have 0 knowledge of the subject they are certified in.
Now I'm sure that some of the people who take these courses walk away with a little bit of permanent knowledge but whos to tell which ones? Are we to assume none of them took anything away? Then its moot, are we to assume they all took a small amount away? Still doesn't seem right.
My suggestion, if you want to make them a little more relavent, require refresher tests every 6 months....bump the fee up another $25 (for tests like the A+) and have a cutback, random sub-section of the test questions, make it a quick test so people don't have to devote alot of their free time to it.
Or, better yet, rely on actual work experience. Either way, the system as it is is nothing more than a good way for "trainers" to earn a living....
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Certifications can cost big bucks!!! Unless you've got the cash or a company that's willing to pay for the cert, you're not able to get one! That means that unless you can financially afford it and pass it on the first try, you might not be able to get a job! That's just not right. The cost for the A+ is about ridiculous. And then you get into the MSCA and MCSE exams....outrageous!
I dunno. When I went to take the W3 Web Dev certification test, all I did was open up FireFox and I received the cert.
You read a little too deeep into the post dear coward.
/25 somewhere in RFC 1918 space. This is because at the time I had a 10baseT hub, and a 100baseTX hub...which the FreeBSD box routed between.
The only thing I dreaded was the wireless test, which threw me for a huge loop...mostly due to the RF theory...which would have been much easier for a general-class ham operator.
The home network question was perfect. Back in that time, I had a cable modem, connected to a FreeBSD firewall with 3 NICs in the box...one public, and two private LANs...each with a
I can only assume you have sufficient experience to get through the HR wheels, which is good for you. We're all glad. But from your post, I assume you have no certifications because you can't read the question for what it really is.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
At least for any long term career. Contractors will probably need them because they often work short jobs with companies who don't know them well enough and can't wait for them to learn something. But for everyone else, certifications are absolutely, positively, meaningless.
Certifications are narrow, and rarely test genuine problem solving skills. They're a marketting tool more than anything else. They sell you the study guide, the test, and once you've invested so much into getting the certification you've just gotta recommend their products in the workplace, otherwise, why did you just go through all that work of getting certified?
The most important skills are a lot more general than any piece of software you apply them to, and can't be easily verified with a certification. If you can learn on demand, quickly, solve any problem, and have a working understand of good design practices, that's more important than proving you know how to use a piece of software.
But what do I know? I have no certifications. Never needed or wanted one.
with the first three questions is that they all encourage you to lie to some extent. (Which is fine, I guess, if they're hiring for a job in advertising or something)
I wish I had gotten the Dry-Erase treatment. I recently interviewed for an entry level Unix position, and one of the questions was to desribe a network I had set up in some way. I proceeded to describe my home network in some detail, and was cut off in the middle, "So your Unix experience is mainly based on your home network?" The answer, of course is yes.
I was applying for an entry level position, and they were still only interested in certifications and a degree of some kind. According to the person I know on the inside that got me the interview in the first place, I know more about Unix than a lot of people that are currently doing the job. But I don't have any paper verification of that knowledge, nor am I good at BSing my way through interviews. So I plan to spend some time getting Certs, and practice selling myself.
Dear god I need to get away from Comcast phone support, and really, certifications seem as good a way to do that as any.
||:|::
What we know to be true:
Certs don't matter
What most people believe:
Certs do matter
If you just think that you're l33t and can get a job nowadays without certs, good luck. IS this right? Not at all. Is it reality? Yes.
We have an asshat at work that has *just started* asking ALL THREE of those questions to interviewees.
I told him it was stupid. He ignored me.
Glad I'm not alone. heh.
I'd like to go through a course or two and pick up some vendor certs for stuff we use at work..
But management tells me "Just read about it on the web" instead of saying "Sure, we'll send you through the courses!"
I haven't seen a lot of Juniper coursework showing up on the web. Sigh.
I have 4 certifications. I only took those because each time my employer who was employing me for years in the same field wouldn't give me a pay raise because I wasn't certified.
I've been in the industry only 18 years, but out of that I have seen the majority of the good developers rarely have all the certifications, while those with certifications wave them like some defensive shield when you question them.
I was taught back in high school years ago that you wrote your thesis statement, followed it with supporting statements, and the wrote your closing.
This guy gives us nothing but anecdotes that don't support his subtitle ("An overreliance on IT sheepskins is a recipe for disaster."), and closes with something faintly resembling a closing statement but which is utterly disconnected from the paragraphs above.
i had to list an occupation on a form recently. after much puzzling: Beat Poet.
In one aspect, we can all thank Microsoft for this one with their MCSE mills which turned out a bunch of talentless mouse jockeys. Mind you, not ALL are talentless...but a lot I knew from the boom were.
I have a cheap, 5 dollar low end SCSI card here that proves your point.
I have a friend who spent 2 years at Computer Education Institute. or CEI for short. After graduation, she decided to build a server to put her knowledge to use. After going to the 2nd hand parts store(Gotta love Computer Renaissance(sp?)!), she came back with a mobo, RAM , videocard, low end scsi card and a few IDE drives. I mention to her, "What's with the SCSI card?" "That's an ATA controller." "No, too many pins. 10 to be exact. Plus there's the SCSI logo printed on the board. Plus the phrase, "SCSI Active Termination" is also printed on the board." "Oh. Oops." I then asked, "Wait, server? What's with the video card?" Her and her roomate gave me a blank stare before asking, "How else are you going to get video?" I reply with, "Telnet?" "What's that?"
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Not always - I hire people who can do the job. I avoid certification like the plague (for the reasons mentioned above) and I recently have started being very wary about recent university graduates (in the uk) because they now seem trained to get jobs rather than do them.
I am about to be part of the procurement of a big outsourced project - and you can bet your bottom dollar that it will go to a company that has the (demonstrable) skills and not those with the best sales guys/credentials/BS
and was about to say it...
Surely managers can see that by doing this, you wind up hiring a bunch of techs with lots of skills on paper, but with next to no interpersonal skills with your client base? That's what cultural compatibility really means. Sure you have Indian companies reading English newspapers, speaking English names but you can't just give these people a crash course on Western civilization and expect them to pick it all up anymore than you expect the paper MCSEs and CCNAs to actually have a clue.
My dad is a system admin/operations manager. The other day he tried calling up several major name computer suppliers to purchase some servers and because they were Indian and couldn't understand his request, he decided to ditch them in favor of a swifter, local manufacturer. This attitude is what is causing these people to lose their customers.
"We don't want cultural compatibility, we want the best tech skills."Fine, let's run with that for a sec. We've already seen what happens when you have zero cultural compatibility.
The number of times I've received shitty escalations from Indian technical staff who are supposed to be CCNPs with B.Comp degrees, escalating to me network abuse complaints originating from 127.0.0.1 ... I've lost count. I've lost count the number of times people I know haven't been able to place an order for a part because they have never heard of it. I've lost count how many times these people state that our firewall is the reason their network is dropping routes, etc. Christ I know people who changed entire software products because they relied on English speaking support for those products and now they can't get it because it has also been outsourced to India.
We've all heard the horror stories and we know they're out there. So my question is how do the managers guage the technical competency of these people? Given the average CIO has the IQ of chimp and is far more skilled at scratching his arse rather than making informed, intelligent outsourcing decisions, just how are they guaging that. I can't see many CIO's listening to their technical staff in house preaching "this would be a bad thing". They would probably see it as nothing more than someone trying to save their jobs.
For so long, IT staff have often been the bad guys or the doomsayers for preaching factual and logical information that these people need to hear only to have it dismissed or thrown back in their face. I see this as no different and see far, far worse times ahead.
As long as managers refuse to listen to or take the advice of the professionals they hire to know more than them in their areas of expertise, then they are effectively shooting themselves and their business in the foot.
Yes, it hurts to discover that you wasted your trust fund on a worthless cert I'm sure.
The only MCSEs worth a damn will be those who were already good at the job before they got MCSE. They probably only bothered with Microsoft cert on a bet or as a dare or while drunk or something. God knows, the truly clueful quite rightly don't consider it worthy of any respect at all.
PHBs are pathologically afraid of responsibilty. Thus when they hire that certified but inexperienced and/or clueless person they can use the excuse that they couldn't have known he would totally fuck the company's system since the employee is fully qualified.
But hire an experienced, clueful person who hasn't had the time to waste obtaining worthless certs and the PHB runs the risk of being accused of hiring somebody patently unsuitable for the job, should that person screw up.
Unacceptable risk. So they will always hire Raj or Neela. Besides, you can pay an MCSE a hell of a lot less than somebody with a useful qualification.
The problem of companies preferring *certified* is prevalent even for linux guys! I know RHCE guys who cant even get mkisofs right!! REALLY!
"If I had gone to university and attained a bachelor's in CS, I would've graduated in 1992. State of the art technology in 1992 is largely irrelevant today, and the only thing that would have been proven by that degree is that I could finish what I started."
Yea, because all those things like algorithms, O notation, principles of optimization, etc, have all changed completely and totally in the past 12 years!
Zing Perhaps you'd have a better appreciation of what you don't know if you took the time to learn about the depth of knowledge that exists in a CS course. Yes, some people can slack through, but there's a reason someone who goes to University will be paid more -- they also happen to know more.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...certs are likely to be a liability. When we interview a candidate, the things we look at are practical experience, apparent knowledge, attitude and the most important factor; passion. If the person has his own network at home, or maintains her own website with custom code, or got fed up with a commercial app and wrote their own replacement, then they are likely to get hired. Nine times out of ten, those folks don't have any certs.
Based on most of our interviews (not all), we've seen that the people with certs are probably the worst candidates. They are usually arrogant pricks who think they should run the department, or they are clueless dorks who can't find the on switch. One of our tests that we give a candidate is presenting them with a PC that has it's cover off. We ask the person to identify as many components as possible. Without fail, most (again, not all) of the people with certs do miserably on this part of the interview. They can't tell you what kinds of slots are on the motherboard, or what kind of ports are on the back of the system. They can't tell you what expansion cards (if any) are in the system, or even identify the CPU. Some of them even make the egregious mistake of calling the box itself a CPU. But the people without certs usually have a pretty good idea of what a PC is made of.
Where passion is concerned, we usually ask our candidates to tell us about their pet projects at home. It's rare, but occasionally we'll find someone who is just as into computers as we (managment) are. This one guy had fourteen servers at home, including one Sun SPARC box and a DEC Alpha box. When asked to name file systems for OSes, not only did he mention Unix file systems before Windows file systems, but he actually knew VMS' file system as well. Now THAT'S passion.
Attitude will get you far, if it's right for the job you're applying for. We look for people who know computers well, but are confident enough to keep quiet about it. Hotdogging will get you nowhere, except maybe a pink slip. Claiming that you know more than you do will make you look foolish. Keeping your nose to the grindstone will get you advancement. And IF you decide to go get a certification of some kind, we'll applaude that, but don't expect to be treated any differently. Arrogance is always an unpleasant trait and is the number one reason we DON'T hire, certification or not.
We had some idiot with a ton of Microsoft certifications come in. To begin with, he completely failed the PC test. He couldn't tell if the system had ISA or PCI slots. He only knew NTFS and FAT as file systems. He still had the attitude that he could "whip this place into shape" even after flunking the PC test! He only had certs and no practical experience. This is your typical candidate with certs, especially MS certs. Needless to say, he didn't get the job. I imagine he probably conned someone else into hiring him. More than likely for some "suit" position that pretends to be a technical position.
Which leads me to one of my last points: Where I work, EVERYONE (managment included) has to be able to operate our systems. This goes all the way from our department head to the lowest grunt on the totem pole. This includes, not just Windows servers, but OpenVMS servers, Cisco network devices, Sun servers, Tru64 servers, HP-UX servers and Linux servers. No one is exempt from crawling under a desk to troubleshoot a PC problem. We maintain a network of thousands of people, millions of users and millions of items to track in inventory with only three main admins and six technicians and we do it pretty well.
I'm not saying that certs are bad, per se. But if you are going out to interview, put them on the resume, but downplay their significance and emphasize the knowledge you acquired outside of your cert studies. If you didn't learn anything outside of cert classes or books and you don't play with this stuff in your spare time, consider looking in a different field. If your primary goal is to make lots
Un-news
I majored in cognitive psychology because it interested me at the time. I worked as a paralegal then taught English in Prague. after travelling, loafing and eventually running out of money, I took a job as a "web developer" with no formal training whatsoever.
And I thought I was alone...
Put identity in the browser.
His only interview question was to hand the candidate a dry-erase marker and draw out their home network and explain how it worked, was addressed, and protected. As far as he was concerned, the group needed a net geek, and someone who didn't have their own network at home wouldn't be interested in the job enough to excel.
Where 'o where was that interview when I needed it...instead of those "where do you see yourself in 5 years" or "tell me what the word Diversity means to you" type questions I seem to always end up with.
WTF? Over?
I think there are two points to make here:
Of course, it costs more to employ someone Really Good(TM), so that's quite a big if in the second point there.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
MSCE and similar certificates are a total nonsense. Those who 'commit' and comply to such inferior so-called qualifications have shown that they are not the right material for an innovative organization. I would never ever hire someone with a donkey certificate like MCSE or similar crap. It only shows that the candidate is a grey, less than average want-to-play-with-real-engineers kind of person that holds a piece of paper that says utterly nothing except that they have been stupid enough to think it is something.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The question is : Are IT Certifications Meaningless ?
:-) fueled by a natural interest for "tinkering" and for technology in all its manifestations do better then "average" people ; for the simple reason they really really like their job, almost always want to learn and are willing to work overtime to solve a problem they find interesting.
:-).In my experience, out of 100 monkeys one hardly finds 10 monkeys evolved into geeks, and many don't evolve at all.
This is not a good question to being with, but the answer is no. For instance, if company X requires company Y to have somebody with certification Z and enter the contracts also because of presence of Z, then it's meaningful
in a business sense.
It doesn't matter that a bunch of other techies say that Z is 1.superficial 2.insufficient 3.barely relevant , even if they're "right" from a technical point of view. Remember that in the "logic" of profit, anything that brings in profit is meaningful.
Now, from a less profit-centered point of view, we could argue that a number of so called certified-persons obtained the certification with fraud , or by simply memorizing a number or recurrent question and answer : this is true for any certification, not necessarily only in the IT business.
The problem with such people becomes manifest when they're asked to do something out of the ordinary or when the problem involves variables that come from sets of variables outside the scope of their certifications. This is predictable and to some extent excusable, as nobody always knows how to handle any combination of variables.
So, who's supposed to do best in such instances ? In my experience, self-propelled "geeks"
In other words, they rrrrrealy are into their work and _not only for money_ even if they obviously ask for money.
Some company noticed that there is a shortage of such people (when the quantity is compared to demand) and attempted to "produce more" of them ; most of times the process of creation, according to such companies, involves memorizing a ton of variables and learn how to set such variables in a way that the "machines" works at the end of the day. Or at best, their students are asked to solve some well-know set of problems.
What they really are producing are not technicians, but (sometimes) well trained monkeys, but marketing always sell them as "specialized technicians". I do not mean monkey as a derogatory term, as they obviously are human and rationally expect to be treated like human beings , but they're trained exactly like I would train a monkey : monkey press ESC key at instance X, monkey set ten variables with 10 clicks. Monkey see, monkey do.
To a degree monkeys are welcome and useful, but they hardly are technicians. They most certainly are not "geeks" , they only share basic dna
Industry wants geeks, because they're flexible.As usually, industry doesn't want to pay proportionally for their skills, but now some industry pretends that geeks are formed en-masse and if possible totally at the expense of society (from public schools, as private are more expensive and usually less cost effective) as they understood many companies in the business of preparing geeks are only selling HOT AIR ; blame marketing, as usual, and blame companies that expect their own hot air not to promote the hiring of more hot air.
The way I see it, the only way to tell someones ability is to sit them down in front of a computer for half an hour and ask them to do things. Grades, MCSE's, degrees etc are all meaningless if the person cant actually do things and think for themselves, why doesnt this happen in real life? At least give people the optionn to say "let me show you what i can do," or "here are my qualifications - 5 PHDs, suck it" I know there needs to be accountability - i.e you cant just let anyone loose on your systems but there must be another way?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Exactly - focusing purely on certifications and scores is a mistake in any industry. When I was at university, there were lots of people who got much better degree scores than I did, but once it came to actually using that knowledge anywhere other than the exam room, they were stuck.
Some people are just good at learning lists of facts and churning them out to order. That doesn't make the whole certification system worthless, it just means that you take the certification for what it really means - the person can learn things for a test and has at least some baseline level of knowledge.
yes
Shortly I realized they were quite behind in terms of tools they were using, always going about the long way of doing things.
There really wasnt an IT person on staff, except for the IT Consultant they hired to come in occassionally and take care of some problems.
After showing them how to use Access more effectively, and fixing a few problems in Access, I started getting trust from them to go in and start adding and updating stuff for convenience.
One such case was that before if they wanted to create a new list of contacts for a new event based on an older list, they would go in one by one and add them in...Imagine doing that for 1,000 people? That took a long time. Naturally I picked up SQL and Visual Basic, and all of a sudden what used to take a day or two, could be done in under a minute! :-)
We did end up having an IT person hired, but unfortunately the gentleman passed away, and shortly after I kind of got pushed to the front by the CFO. At the moment I dont have an official title, so I gave myself one.
So I do most of the more basic IT support and troubleshooting. If something like say the Exchange server get's borked, then we call in the IT Consultant. I dont presume to know everything, and when there's a problem I really can't fix, I admit to the CFO that's the case and the IT Consultant gets called in.
I dont have any sort of certifications, which may be seen as a bad thing. However, I do have tech experience which gives me an advantage and also I'm trusted by the company to fix something if I know how to.
The basic point here is that you may be able to get away without certifications at a smaller company, but you have to be trusted to not bork anything up.
There are examples of other people in the programming field of which David K. Every of MacKiDo and iGeek fame comes to mind. He doesnt have an official computer science or engineering degree (at least last time I checked), yet he's done contract work for big companies including (I think) Apple. As he put it once "And it's something I warn kids about; you can succeed without a degree, but it is a lot harder."
I would assume the same can be the case with IT certifications, though as David Every also said once "The irony is that while many companies will not hire employees without degrees, they will hire consultants without one."
I'm definitely finding both of these to be true to some degree :-)
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But considering that I just lost out on a job to someone that had 1 years of telecom experience but had managed to study and get a CCNA CCNP, CCDA, CCDP, CISSP compared to my 10 years of telecom experience 8 of which was in the relative department and I had only bothered getting the CCNA becuase CCIE's were asking for less than I made 2 years ago. I may have to rethink my position on that. Though after the manager gave me the letdown speech I told him my exact abilities compared to the individual's cert's he seemed to regret the decision.
Owell I'll have another shot in a few weeks hopefully.
of the IT industry how exactly?
i realize that looking up the answers on google doesn't involve paper or your own memory so i guess i'll cover that one for you
I was at a conference this week and the comment was made that the students do not understand that the "degree/cert" is the key to the interview, their real knowledge got them the job. Do not forget that Open Source is a certification, how many commits have been accepted from you.
My Mum also told me that as a secretary she would filter the resumes her manager based on rules. Uni degree or 5 years of experience. The manager did not see your resume if you did not fit a 'tick list'. So have the appropriate experience or qualifications to get to the top of the resume pile or you will not get an interview.
Any qualifications will get you to the interview what you do once there opens the door. This was pretty much my story, I had a High Distinction in a single computing subject and no other qualification. I play with computers during high school, this was before the IBM PC was released. It took me about 8 years to get an 'official' programming job. I was configuring reports, doing operations management, loading tapes for a long time before my break came. So if you are at the beginning take the loan get the certifications. If you are not willing to bet on yourself why would anyone else do it.
I read up on the juniors that are "sure" their ability is worth a shot. They are "smarter" that a qualified person. To be sure there is the expectional case that this is true. Most homebrew people cannot cope outside reinstalling a simple computer. Depth on one type if computer does not equal breadth. Certification forces you to learn some of this breadth and opens eyes as to how much there is to actually learn. A failure breeds some humility.
I also read with joy the "qualified" person saying they would not trust an unqualified hack. I lack ANY formal qualifications. I do not have CCNA, I just taught it for a while. I am not a qualified programmer but I just finished a semester teaching 120 students. I really do believe that I am better qualified than most "papered" people out there. If you really want to excel at computer you must be willing to read and learn. You must be willing to struggle through some awful textbooks at times (I read a windows programming manual, took me 6 months! Bad was not an understatement). You must invest your personal time to learn, write Open Source software like OpenOffice.org (plug!)
So what does make the difference. Interview well, actually like the person you are talking too. If you think they are high paying idiots it is likely you will not perform and then you will loose the job. Like the job first and let the money come to you. It is a formula that has worked for me.
Experience is the best certification.
Anyone should have a chance certifications or not. If you like keep em if not sack em -easy.
Exactly. I would go even further, though. For a large organization, most positions require some level of competence - and competence over and beyond will be wasted to soem extent. A large organization is by necessity fairly bureaucratic and inflexible, and it won't really help all that much if you are doing a better/faster job than your job profile calls for.
So, what a large HR department wants to do is to find the people fulfilling the technical requirements, and then focus on how well the applicant will actually function in the corporate culture and together with the other members of his/her future department. This is much more important than relative technical skill beyond that necessary to do the job.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Funny, I've not gone without work for over 14 years. Nor have I have not been able to buy the latest toy I've wanted. I don't have a single cert. Hell I don't have a single degree. Certs and degrees mean "verifiably trainable" that's about it.
If the idiots doing the hiring are basing it on certs and not skills then you really don't want to work there. Who wants to work with a bunch of talentless hacks?
I'm a BE/BInfTech student and i am interested in certifications, but i dont know the difference between them all. my uni only offers MS and Cisco, and i am wondering what the certifications really mean (what do you have to know/learn). I am also interested in other certifications like RHCE and RHCT and other Linux certifications (and if the skills from one would be transferable to other distos).
Weapon
About all you get certified for is that you could cram a whole bunch of random-ass info into your head and remember it long enough to take a test.
I propose a new standard of certifications that is indicative of real world experience:
IFUFIM - I fucked up the router but fixed it myself
BROSCD - Boot record on my sparc was fucked so I got in with boot -s cdrom
NISSUR - I setup NIS/NIS+ and survived.
LDAPSR - I setup LDAP and survived.
LUTKAB - Linux used to kick my ass, badly.
IWORPA - I would rather be programming in assembly.
VIBPUS - I know visual basic but it's for pussies.
BUGFET - I know the diff between a bug and a feature.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
No fundamental Computer Science subject has changed since 1992 (or indeed 1988). At my school, we have so far been taught:
1. Functional programming. Pretty much the same, though evolved, since the sixties.
2. OO principles. Evolved, but the same since the sixties (or well, UML was useless, but that tought us patterns).
3. Compiler writing. Has NOT changed in ages.
4. CPU design. Even here, nothing has changed. Using the classic Patterson and Hennesey text, we wrote in a VHDL language, a five staged pipelined CPU, with (for our part at least) a fairly sophisticated local branc predictor (no global prediction). These where out there in the sixties too.
5. An Operating system (!). A monolithic kernel written for Digital Alpha machines. OS design has (in large ways) remained fairly static since the design of Unix. Only the designs of Mach (and NT partly) deviate much from the old ways.
6. A network protocol stack, based on IP. Which was introduced in the eighties (I think?).
And that's the first two years. I can't wait for the further knowlegde I will receive over the next three years.
Saying a CS degree would be outdated, is to not understand what computer science is about.
My minor of information sciences HAS changed though. Text interfaces has gone the way of the dodo, but the basic psychology behind it all, has of course also not changed.
The REAL problem of CS is that it doesn't teach you specific things, which certs does. Combined, it should be pretty powerful.
If the certification is related with one product like a Application Server, or Network Maintenance, they can be acurate, because of the kind of know-how that is required to work with-in those areas.
If the certification is for something like "programming" (be it Java, C++ or any other), it depends ALOT of how the certification process is built, because in that you can't, as i've seen happen, just ask what Function/API/Class is needed for doing something...
Like any educational level, there is always confusion between the true savants and the memory monkies... Unfortunatly for the savants, because there are too many memory monkies...
I went to a mediocre (top 20) uni in the UK, did a BSc in Computer Science, scraped a pass (no honours). Didn't hav anything shiny on the CV, no certifications or anything. Went up for a job against 1600 people, got it. Why? I had relevent experience in Student TV, had the skills to show quick logical and mathematical thinking, (not so much on the linguistical stuff), and had evidence of quick learning off my own back.
I'd rather see a picture of what tech books are on a candidate's bookshelf rather than any certification. If the only book there is a test prep for a certification, I don't want him. If it's loaded with coffee-stained and tattered OS, networking, programming language, database, and other types of technical tomes I'm interested. Especially if I see older and updated editions 'cause he cares enough to keep current.
Although they might not be the best measure of what I know, they have always helped me greatly when negotiating wages, promotions, and raises. So I wouldn't label them as worthless.
"Who hasn't slipped into the break room for a quick nibble on a love Newton before?" - Mr. Peterman.
You misread the original post. This person never stated that he had trouble taking that test. He specifically said the hardest test he had ever taken was <insert weird acronym here>.
This person even agreed with you when he said that that guy was "particularly brilliant". If you're going to work in the software world without even being able to read an interpret a <100 line slashdot post correctly, how do you expect that people will allow you to work in >100.000 lines of code programmes?
on WHO is doing the hiring. BTW, it is also a good litmus test of an organisation's skill.
.....naturally, if I had to ask..... it was -1 on moderation results!!!!!
Consider this: be they big or small, companies who let dept. heads, instead of HR or else, do their own recruiting have, on average, more distributed responsibilities.
After all, it 's acceptable to think that this organizations are driven by results.
Now, people driven by results are less likely to be impressed by neat pieces of paper. they'll start to go into the technical questions earlier, rely more on interviews, do their own questionnaires, etc.
The fun part is, that goes both ways: by the level of the interview, you can get a feel for the company's level of skill and ability that you will not have if you are handled by HR.
So, if a company is staffed entirely by PHBs', it shows early on, and you can draw your own conclusion. I may be a difficult subject, but when I considered changing jobs, I had to have a final interview with the person responsible for my area of work (Finance).
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
When I used to work at Microsoft (Developer Support division) we were under tons of pressure to get certs because "it will impress the customer and assure them of your skills in solving the issue". What total BS. We had tons of testkiller, braindump, and other such cheats flowing around between all of us there in DS. It was all about getting the cert credit on your review and a few letters behind your name to impress management and had little to do with the real skills we needed in the job.
This space for rent.
Also a videocard is convenient for installing the thing and for maintenance if there's trouble with it..
Well, nitpicks aside, you're right though.
I work at a medium-sized company and as such, have realized at least three times that certification is meaningless.
Our Netware admin who got certified in 1993 and never got recertified (back then Novell certs expired). All he does is use fancy terms to explain why the servers are screwed up - then reboots.
Since he doesn't know what he's doing, he got the ok to hire a consultant to set up Groupwise. The consultant had no clue, took him more than 5 days to figure out how to get connected to our ISP via ISDN PPP connection, then configured that server with a 192.16 IP (an IP belonging to lanl.gov) instead of a 192.168. Over 40 hours to misconfigure something - at (at the time) $95/hour. He was certified.
And the last example. We switched ISPs. Had to give our current router back to the ISP and get a new one. Sales staff was wooed by fancy buzzwords without conferring with me. So once the new router was delivered by the consultants, it took *4* people to try to configure it. They had no idea that Cisco routers don't come standard with a WIC. So they had to scrounge around town for one. Took them approximately 55 man hours after that to try to figure out how to configure the router for the new ISP. They left one night, left a note on my desk saying that it was ready to roll but "it may need some tweaking tomorrow." Needless to say they never plugged the router into the T1 jack so as such, never tested it. One of them was Cisco certified. The other three were along for no reason other to try to screw us with a higher bill. This order was placed 2 months prior so we wouldn't have any issues when our previous ISP's contract expired. The T1 was installed 2 weeks prior to them coming out. Because of their incompetence, installation was delayed, our ISP shut off service as expected and we were down for a week while they tried everything they could to figure out how to configure the router.
I don't claim to know much about Ciscos, but what it took them over 55 hours to not do, took a friend of mine 5 minutes to do correctly, once i plugged the router into the switch, had him SSH into a server I run, then telnet to the router.
I'm not a Cisco nerd. I'm not a Netware nerd. I don't run Windows. Yet I've seen that certifications don't mean squat.
Another is yearly performance reviews at a large company. I have been pressured to get a cert so that I would have a 'positive action' to report on my review. But then, oddly enough, there was an issue about the company reimbersing me if I tried to get in a cert in an area unrelated to my work.
I figured if I had to get a cert I might as well learn something new. The company was only willing to pay if they could use the cert in marketing me. Humm, so I guess that is really two other issues with certs; quick checks on reviews and companies selling consoltants.
I feel like I fall into the "can learn it camp". My boss walked up to me one day and said, "can you get your MCSD.NET and Java certs quickly?". The main reason, EXTERNAL contracts.
This issue goes beyond the internal hiring process and straight into the RFP process. I would hope that whatever the solution is enlightens the people who write the RFP as well (who are usually the same types of people who are HR drones).
I'll have to say one thing though, I have my MCSD.NET and Java Dev certs. For someone who falls into the likes to learn camp, I think the process was "ok". The exams were WAY too easy. All I found was that you are exposed to a broad set of technologies at a low to medium level of difficulty. One last plus: when in a technical interview, I now KNOW what they should know if they passed the exam. You should see the looks on thier faces...
In the long run, whether you have a degree or certs out the whazoo; Would anyone want to work for an organization who puts faith into bits of paper?
I've worked with a broad scope of IT professionals and some of the best I've worked with were all self taught. The only people with degrees and certs that impressed me were the people who truly enjoyed the technological challenges and computing in general. As much as a degree and certs indicate "time spent" achieving a goal, a lot of managers quickly find out that most strive for the pay, not the work.
I wouldn't want to work for an organization who didn't bother to note my devotion and desire for the technology and what can be done with it.
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
____ Certification like Degrees provide the basics, but both are
all to frequently obtained by regurgitation rather than
competence/performance/skills/intelligence. This is frequently
reflected in business with managers knowing more how to manage their
careers (all the way to CEO) much better than managing a project,
mission, and/or people to obtain profitable/reproducible results.
____ Performance of companies appear frequently based on market ... missing leading indicators that small, ... technology
dynamics far more than management/leadership skills. Failures and
fads from GM, IBM,
economic, personal products may be the way to go for the future to
the DotCom Boom-Bust, to the telco, data, bio, nano,
laws that are purchased by special-interest to protect market-share
or defend mythical moral-truths. All wasting (almost treasonable) our
nations' money, resources, time, and future vainly trying to stop
reality and change. I hope that soon more of our national leaders
will recognize and understand that education, domestic policy,
national interest, and a solid focused Defense will provide peace and
prosperity for our children's future long before the following of the false-gods of capitalist greed and religious myth.
____ Capitalism is good as an economic model (I like it, as best ... political dazzler pageants that
possible), but as a Governing principle it will prove to rank with
Communism as a failure. I hope we return to the democratic
aspirations (all are equal) of the founding father ASAP. Citizens
have the right to vote, but special-interest buy the votes with the
best sound-bites, best dressed,
have ever existed. We need to disenfranchise all special-interest
from corrupting our democracy and destroying our future. I recommend
that all US citizens vote against all corporate, political, and
religious incumbents until there are laws that exist which result in
prison and/or loss of citizenship when special-interest attempt to
influence and when politicians act for special-interest.
____ Oh, PLEASE, do not play the Rush pundit dogma-rhetoric game ..., then you are far to delusional to
of how do you define special-interest. If you need that logic to
validate your reality
understand reality.
Reality is a self induced hallucination.
Has anyone noticed ... that when I get any excuse I slam
special-interest followers.
OldHawk777
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Hmm.. I will be. After all this time I thought MCSE stood for Must consult someone experienced
Did you...
A. get a cert because it was part of your training
or
B. get a cert because the morons want you to have one
If you are a member of camp A, please stop coding.
Relying only on certs being a mistake is something anyone that has been in corporate IT for any amount of time already knows. However, calling the certs "useless" is probably going a step too far. Certs are good to a point, but experience and the quality of the individual are far more important.
Aww man, I was with you until you said this:
I graduated high school in 1988. If I had gone to university and attained a bachelor's in CS, I would've graduated in 1992. State of the art technology in 1992 is largely irrelevant today, and the only thing that would have been proven by that degree is that I could finish what I started.
I was in from 1988-1994 (U.S. Army, component level intel systems electronics tech and then Unix guy), and around 1999 started a degree using the G.I. Bill at night (completing this early next year). My wife, for the record, nailed a bachelors early on in computer science, and uncannily has a skill set very much like my own. She is also ex-military.
Like you, I've worked steadily, filled out the resume, and progressed, but I'm telling you now the degree does matter. I'm always one step ahead of my wife in terms of hands on troubleshooting, we both have various certs, and we're both Unix people. She will be the first to tell you that my negotiating skills are better than hers. And she also makes about 15k better than I do. Hell, according to HR ANY degree is better than none. Have you ever thought about general educational achievement? We all know people who are awesome on the console that do not have a degree, but unless you have an 'in', many HR departments WILL toss you into the circular file if you don't have the sheepskin.
The idea that what you learn at the university should always be relevant is a misnomer; IT is not the only thing that advances. Do you think everything people have studied in modern physics will hold true in the years to come? How about electrical engineering or medicine?
To summarize, it is excellent that you've done so well without a degree, but don't devalue having a degree. You may get lucky in the coming years, but sooner or later it will likely be used as a discriminator against you.
We can argue all day long about "certs are worthless" and "my [fill-in-the-cert(s)] makes me king ka-ka" - but it really comes down to realizing that there's a big picture to IT survival - actually knowing your ka-ka and being able to demonstrate your ka-ka-ness upon request.
My Cost Effective Cliff Notes strategy:
1) Install GNU/Linux
2) Learn everything you can about it and the services that run upon it. (aka. RTF man pages)
3) Save your money and learn a new word - INITIATIVE.
These are optional - only in the case of persuing a certification:
4) Get a book and self-study. Concepts you've learned with GNU/Linux will be a strong foundation toward any other OS specific knowledge.
5) Get your employer pay for your exams, or find a class that includes the exam and tell them it's a training class you really need to become a more productive employee.
What I'm getting at is that, technically, BOTH arguments are correct - certifications must be complemented with real world knowledge, self-determination, INITIATIVE, confidence, and skill in order to be worthwhile.
Otherwise, certs really are useless - and so are the people claiming the king ka-ka title solely because of them.
My too-sense....
A tip: save Eva's pita.
The sad part is that I knew a "sys admim/tech support" guy who was so incompetent, he would've flunked A+ certification test. I taked to a project manager about this and he told me that he had a minor in CS and they couldn't find anyone else better (it was during the boom).
In this aspect certifications, or even college degrees show at least some sort of minimal book knowledge (providing that the person did not cheat) even though it does not say anything about the competentice of the person.
Some job posts actually require certain certification, and for does, you should get certified. Otherwise, I don't think that it's worth it unless you are into taking tests to measure your book knowledge.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Yeah, I know. But in addition to all-Foundry, we're also all-Microsoft (or almost all -- the department forum is on a Linux box, and most of the security stuff is Linux or BSD-based), and I need to make sure I know how things like Active Directory work in detail, and the Securing certs actually have some useful points.
:)
Believe me, if I could, I'd have given you +1 Insightful.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
what do you call a doctor that graduated from the worst medical school on earth at the bottom of his class?
Doctor.
Too true... and since I am a doctor, I'll vouch for this. But the truth is that class rank has very little to do with whether your doctor is worth a damn.
For instance, one of the best psychiatrists I have ever met or known was DEAD LAST in his class. Why? He marches to his own drummer, and refused to play the med school game (cmon...you know the game. Every time you're in a class or on a rotation, whether it's surgery, pediatrics, plastics, etc, it magically becomes your "future specialty" and/or the most interesting subject you've ever studied). Some people simply refuse to kiss up, and I respect those folks, because it's definitely the road less-traveled. You can go reasonably far in school by being a fawning yes-man, but if you don't know the science, you won't make the cut.
I'd personally rather have a doctor who's a bit lacking in the personality department, but really, really knows his stuff. I fully recognize that my perspective as an insider in my own profession makes my priorities a bit different from the average patient, yet I've always found it fascinating that marginal doctors with great personalities get sued far less than brilliant doctors who are brusque.
There IS value to be found in objective measures; they give some sense of whether you've learned the material. Some people test well, and some do not, but if you don't know the minimum material, forget passing the three steps of the US Medical Licensing Exam, to say nothing of your specialty boards. As an example, we had people in medical school who did very well on tests throughout their rotations and subsequently failed the USMLE (as it turned out, they had access to old test files). Make enough hurdles, and those who cheat and cut corners will eventually stumble.
I don't have a problem with testing... because there's frankly no feasible substitute. An objective measure of knowledge has value if sufficiently rigorous. It definitely has value in medicine... but having never taken any sort of computer cert, I can't say whether that's the case for IT or not.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Do you think military courses don't teach that kind of thing? I have scads of theoretical training. Some is relevant to my job, some of it isn't
In addition to that, if I had to I could troubleshoot your motherboard to the component level and make your IP network connection work over a gyro-stabilized satellite link from a pitching, rolling platform.
Just because my skillset isn't the same as yours doesn't mean it's invalid, just different.
The major difference between military and civilian courses is that civilian courses focus on how things work, the military ones focus on how things can go wrong and how to cope with them once they do. Having good RTFM skills and being able to apply logical thought are what is important.
If a company's management chain is so weak that they need to use certifications to determine employee skill, you can be sure that working there will be a bureaucratic nightmare.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
By same argument, college degress are worthless and everyone who's attending one should drop out.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I still don't know what to think about certification.
I have about 15 years of experience doing miscellaneous software development (a lot of C++, SQL, web apps, and tools), and I'm now a "jack of all trades" kind of engineer -- I can now jump into just about any software project and hit the ground running.
Do I know every little detail of setting up Windows/Linux servers and networking? No. There's probably no way I could pass those certs. But I know enough to do the common stuff, and that seems to be good enough. My years of experience on countless systems gives me a kind of "street smarts" that allows me to make good educated guesses and figure things out on my own.
I'm starting a new job on Monday. I didn't get the job because of any certs on my resume -- I have none. I think I got the job because I knew how to hit the curveballs they threw at me during the interview -- I can think on my feet, and I sense that they see that as being a more important skill.
Okay. A few problems with your anecdote:
1) Never would a computer class ever, EVER tell you how to identify a SCSI card because that's trivial -- the sort of trivia you can learn reading the back of a box. The sort of trivia that would be wrong as soon as you learned it -- tell me, how many pins on a MODERN scsi cable?
Scoffing at a person for not knowing the difference between two interfaces is foolish. If anything, scoff at her for not checking to be sure the cable plugged in to the hard disc before buying it!
2) You're claiming that telling a person to run HEADLESS is something to be proud of? It is TOUGH to set up a machine without a video card and a keyboard...sure, it can be done, but most of the early set up of a machine is acheived quicker with a monitor.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I have two master level certs, and let me tell ya. Didn't help one bit. Not one extra penny. It cost me a lot of time though. The BEST certification you can get is a reputation among your peers. Join a networking professional organization in your town!!
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Some certifications are a way to learn how to use a particular company's hardware or software; there is usefulness in that.
Are you really learning anything, that is the question.
I have to disagree with the author; my personality and his certainly wouldn't match up and I would have a hard time working with an individual like that.
It's not so much that "certifications" are useless, as a whole, it's that some certifications are next to useless, or are just incredibly easy to get. And on top of that, the "goal" gets twisted, and the idea becomes "passing the exam", instead of looking deeper into actually learning the material that the exam is supposed to test you on. "Cracking" the test, so to speak is what is creating this problem.
Then again, there is no universal law that states that if you are a highly talented HR person that you will also be a highly talented writer of articles, is there? Any talented, careful, professional HR person with an attention to detail can weed out those individuals who have used the certification as leverage to try to obtain a position that they are not qualified for.
If you know your stuff, the certification is not necessarily a hoop to jump through, it's more like a bookshelf on which to put your books, or something like that. If you have to study for it, you should study for it, and you should learn what you need to know. If you really know what you need to know to pass the certification, and the certification is a difficult and professionaly prepared certification, then it should more or less be somewhat of a piece of cake to take the exam.
Any half-way competent HR person can weed their way through these types of things and make sufficiently accurate decisions regarding personnel. Whether or not that HR person can write a good article, or whether an individual who can write a good article is also a qualified HR person is implementation-specific.
At least an MSCE has a big test of specific knowledge at the end.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Dan
http://pix.dontexist.com
Mainly because I don't have a job now, I'm working towards certification in two areas. Before I get into that, my background includes a bachelor's in electrical engineering and 8 years of experience in the software industry. So I have a foundation to add the certificates too, as a job applicant I'm not trying to push the certs as my primary experience.
That said, I'm working towards certification in both C++ and UML. The former I have experience debugging, but I'm not (or rather, wasn't) comfortable designing with. The latter is to help with OO knowledge and design. The certificates are through the University of Washington, not some technical school of questionable reputation. The amount of work for these classes is on par with standard 3-5 credit engineering courses. I know Sally Struthers can't offer anything comporable, which is why I wouldn't settle for certification from a non-major university.
Do I believe the certs are *necessary* for me to get a job? No, if Seattle had a decent job market I could land a job pretty quick (I've gotten response from San Jose/Portland, I'm just not willing to relocate yet). But really I need some resume fodder to keep me looking busy, employers don't like long gaps of unactivity in a candidate.
On top of that, after being out of college for 8 years it's about time to go back and take some classes to brush up on technologies I didn't study in college. Note that I said classes, not certification. Really, their is no reason to get certification for everything and if only a single class is relevant to your discipline.
Summing it up, classes from major university == good. Certification is not necessarily required and may in fact be overkill. Certification is not a substitute for real experience/education.
when the guy who calls the shots (he who calls the candidates for interview) is stupid...
Okay, stop right there and tell me why would you want to work for this guy?
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
I have been in contact with one two many CCNA/CCNEs that have never actually setup a cisco router to do actual work outside of the lab environment.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
One is to just try things and see how them work. This is not good, and sometimes very bad, for the quality of your work.
The other is to read a bit of theory, try things, and look for the explanations of everything you don't fully understand. This, I think, may sometimes be even better than any course. Of course, you must think things rigorously, be willing to challenge yourself and spend the time necessary to achieve a good level of understanding.
It's true, I don't have degrees or certs but I have seven years of full-time experience and 20 years of hobby time. I've quickly discovered I'm not worth anything to anybody until I can flash certs or degrees, which is especially ironic since my current employer recently "let go" of a guy with a CCNA and MCSE because he was a lazy, arrogant charlatan.
No HR call screener ever seems to give a crap that I am perfect for a position. They end up wrestling with me about salary and use phrases like "not strong enough for this position" as if I am supposed to naturally respond to that in some non-hostile way. Sometimes they'll offer me a Help Desk position for about what I'm earning now. But I haven't even gotten a face-to-face interview yet.
Oops! Out of time. Gotta go memorize the OSI layers and the maximum segment length of 10Base2 coax...
As an ex-instructor at CEI, its all about leading a horse to water.
First of all, 2 years at CEI is a long time which means she was screwin something up to drag it out that long.
Second, I taught on average 20-30 students per class. Of that 10% were hard core into what they were doing, had the natural talent, and will probably succeed in IT. The next 20% had the natural talent, but didn't study hard and they might do well. The next 40% studied hard but didn't have the natural talent, they might suceed but it will be a hard road for them. The last 30% were waste, they were had no talent and didn't care about the courses.
If anything CEI is better than most comp. schools in that the classes are longer (18 class days per class) and not too focused on certs(though you will get encouraged to take some).
Now for the main benefit for alot of certs is that vendors(Cisco, MS, etc.) will give the company kickbacks and benefits.
Thats strange... and I don't mean this to be confrontational but I honestly thought the CWNA was the easiest joke of a test I have ever taken. I studied for maybe five hours... and I am definately not what you would consider to be exceptional.
the same "paper is worthless" approach could be applied to four year colleges and even graduate schools if you wanted to be really harsh. It really depends on whether the job consists of performing the skill the cert measures. CCNE is a good cert because the people with it usually hold jobs of wiring networks and the CCNE is widely perceived to be difficult.
The real problem is that many hiring managers misunderstand what they are hiring people to do. When someone hires me, I will either fix business problems or generate revenue by helping to develop products. There are an enormous number of skills that go into being an good engineer and a good project manager (even if you are just managing yourself). Whether or not I happen to have a Java Programmers Certification is irrelevant- it only shows I know how to use the syntax of java (an important starting point for a junior programmer, but not for a senior, an architect or a manager). Many of the factors that determine how good an engineer is are difficult to measure except by giving them projects and seeing how they do.
This is probably why so many engineering jobs come through referrals. Nearly any time I didnt have a specific engineering manager pushing to have me hired, I would end up having HR ask me irrelevant questions about whether I could use development environment a or b, or having some junior programmer try to ask me trick questions about using arrays. When someone you know is a good engineer says "this guy I know is a really solid engineer" it goes a long way towards you hiring them.
Similarly, many people erroneously assume that because someone has an MBA they will actually know how to run a business or even manage their own ass. The real world supplies ample evidence to the contrary.
Just because you dropped the CS program doesn't mean that it's worthless?! I am tired of hearing this bullshit ... "Oh it was too easy so I dropped out of CS" mentality. IMHO people who say this were lazy and found the first excuse they could find to drop out of the CS program.
Personally, I think people confuse Computer Science and IT. Computer Science, in the strictest of terms, has nothing to do with Computers! Yes, that's right! Nothing to do with computers! It's the same as saying that Astronomy has nothing to do with telescopes, which is totally correct! Computers, as well as telescopes, are mere tools that fit into the computing/astronomy paradigm. So while IT is an ever-changing field, the concepts of Computer (Computing) Science are not.
Look, the only reason people look for certifications is to avoid having any competence in the fields that they hire people in.
"The guy you just hired has 0 competence in the field you hired him for!"
"Look, he had a certification, you can't blame me."
While, at the same time, people that hand out certifications can't flunk any of them:
"Look, it isn't my fault that 90% of the people that you accept for certification programs are too stupid to understand what's going on!"
"We only make money on those that graduate! Pass them!"
Competency can't be judged by certification programs or those that hire on the basis of them. You got the wrong people hiring them, for the wrong reasons; and the wrong people certifying them, for the wrong reasons!
I would hire somebody who is willing to face and overcome their difficulties before somebody who feels that they're better or smarter than others.
Being able to cooperate is more important than being brilliant. If you can't work on a team, you're useless.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I'm going to steal that idea about asking about their home network and I wish someone asked that of me(p-t-p DS3 in the rack is my new pride and joy)
To me, the only thing having a cert says is the person had too much money to waste on a 6wk class. It does indicate they have some knowledge of basic and intermediate features and concepts, but with those types of rush em thru classes, how much do they really retain a year down the road?
It's really the intelligence level of the person that matters. I've seen people with certs up the wazoo that can barely add a user to a unix system. I've argued with a Director of IT (and his subordinate manager) that collisions were not propagating all over our net because they stop at the switch port... by definition. I've seen people with college degrees from impressive and not so impressive schools that barely know what they're doing. I've seen people with no more than a high school degree that know their stuff inside and out. And I've also seen degree'd people that really know their stuff as well as a high school grad that didn't know much.
A slip of paper with a stamp of approval means nothing. And it really tells a prospective employer nothign other than you took a course. It doesn't tell you if they learned anything or can apply any of that to the REAL world.
I can tell you this. If I interview several people and all do reasonably well and their experience level is: lots of certs, college degree, college and certs, no certs or degree, but 4 years experience in the industry, that I'm going to most likely hire the last one.
Nothing beats real world experience. Of course, that's not to say i couldn't make the wrong decision. The 4yr exp. guy could have got a gig thru nepotism and skated for 4 years, but hopefully the interview would have weeded him out if that was the case.
"duh!"
A few years ago we hired a PC/Network Tech. Any resume with an MCSE on it went straight to the round file.
However, there is a disturbing trend in a lot of places to not focus on the how-stuff-works or the how-to-cope -- these people focus only on the using current technology with no understanding at all.
If something goes wrong, and you know how it works, you can always figure out what to do. However, if you've trained at a technical college and all you know is how to be a Windows 2000 MCSE, you're out of luck when Windows XP comes along and you have to way of applying your earlier knowledge because you have no understanding.
All too unfortunately, a lot of people assume that what comp sci is in university is a really big version of how-to-program that they did in high school or on their own time, when really it covers so much more.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The problem is that they aren't really finding the *top* 10%, they're merely finding 10%, and *hoping* that it is also the top 10%.
Although I too love the ego boost, it probably means you are not aiming high enough for your skills. You should get rejected ocationally if you are playing to your skill/qualification level.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
so what do you suggest? if there are 900 applications in the pile, and you have to pare down the list almost immeadiately to a more manageable fifty candidates or so, how do you make the cut?
They prove that you can: It's experience that's really valuable, but a cert has it's place. Plus it gets your foot in the door. It also can be used to confuse the clueless boss (or potential boss) as some companies follow the insane process of having the CIO and the CFO (who is almost always a CPA) be the same person. That's a true disaster, folks, I know...it's what I have to deal with daily.
MCP, A+, Net+ -- and I'm not upset I spent the time and money on them, but I'm also smart enough to not lord it over people either.
I have a BBA in MIS, an HP-UX CSA, a SCJP, and 2 MCP( C# asp.net/ desktop) certs. I've worked 2 years in operations doing everything from answering help desk calls to Korn shell scripting, ASP / ASP.Net web programming and database design. Unfortunately I have the title "Computer Operator" which pigeon-holes me into a low pay position.
If you want 50 out of 900, you probably just pick all the comprehensible and not obviously lying CVs you've got, and you're done. :-)
But seriously... Of course you have to filter, but HR drones who do it with tick-boxes and don't know what the job actually involves are the worst kind of counterproductive. In particular, they frequently fail to understand the relationships between different-sounding skills in IT, and consequently can't gauge how well an applicant's skill set really matches up to the requirements of the job (assuming they even understand the latter).
Basically, HR tend to look for all the direct matches, but you'll be very lucky to find a perfect match for both the technical skills and the context you'll use them in. Usually the difficult -- but more important -- part is looking at the supporting skills. Has this person used the right technical skills in other contexts (and if so, how close are those contexts to yours)? Have they used related technical skills in the right context, so they have experience of that problem domain and its quirks? What is their breadth of related skills overall; how adaptable is this candidate in practice?
To give a concrete example, suppose you need an intermediate-level programmer for a particular development project, which is written in Java. Most HR people I've encountered will look at a CV, look for experience using Java, and just bin those with the fewest years of experience or something equally black and white. A significant number would fail to appreciate that any J2SE or J2EE mentioned on the CV is Java work, and give it no credit at all.
Now, someone who understood would be looking for what parts of Java were used. There's a world of difference between writing end-user apps with Swing and writing back-end J2EE code! They'd be looking for whether the previous uses had been in related contexts or not, and they'd be looking for general experience with things like OO programming languages, distributed systems, use of Java-related tools or other programming languages with similar characteristics, etc.
Of course, as well as technical skills, you're also looking for any useful soft skills: is this candidate used to working in a large/small team; do they have any management/leadership experience that might be relevant to this position; do they have "customer-facing" experience? Often these will be far more important distinctions between similarly technically qualified candidates than an extra year using this or that specific tool.
The thing that always gets me is that a lot of HR people claim this is all too difficult to do in practice, and with 900 candidates you have to shortlist before you can look at this level of detail. What I don't understand is what value the HR people add at all, if they're just going to run the CVs through an automated system without giving them even a minute of informed personal attention each to get the right people on the shortlist. You pay your HR people to facilitate getting the right people into your organisation. Giving each potential candidate that minute or two during shortlisting, so the more technically knowledgable people can then interview the best directly, is exactly what a good HR department is for.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
--Begin Rant--
Lessee, I have all the certs for NT 4.0, they're worthless now and I have all the certs for W95, also worthless! If I'd bothered getting any W2k certs they too would have been worthless about now! And IMHO A+/Net+ is a joke, I took both of 'em at the same time and passed without preparation, AND NOBODY CARES! I've never gotten a job because of any of them, half the time the HR kiddy can barely pronounce the stuff they are required to ask, you know LY-NUX and EMM ESS CEE EEE and so forth, all any of this stuff will get you is a thank you fromm the big companies that push it.
--End Rant--
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Obviously, judging from your commentary, I can determine two things:
a) You are a programmer.
b) You are not a very good one.
Well, I guess that depends. When you download a new program, do you -- before anything else -- pull up the source code and check to be sure that that all tree operations were written using the most efficient algorithm?
Or do start the program and see if it, you know, has all the features implemented, looks good, and does what you need it to do?
I'm guessing the latter. Which means that you don't give a shit about "good programming," as preached by computer scientists. You only care about good programs. Computer scientists don't make programs; they make textbooks and write papers about algorithms and design and clever new ways of accessing hardware. PROGRAMMERS make programs, and good programming has as much to do with computer science as good masonry has to do with civil engineering. One influences the other, but proficiency in one is not required for the other.
I would define a good programmer not as one who uses the most efficient algorithm and knows intuitively every way he will manipulate a certain piece of data, but as one who makes the most efficient use of time to create the most full featured program. If I could sit down and take as much time as I please to write a dumb utility method, I would. But generally speaking, I have a half hour. So I use the "best practices under twenty minutes" method of coding. I take the a bunch of somewhat efficient, memory wasting generic data structures I'm used to and pick the one that's closest to what I want to do. When that becomes ungainly, I swap it out.
And I guess that's why you say I am not a very good programmer. I guess to impress the slashdot crowd, I should say "fuck the schedule" and code a tiny jewel of a utility, the kind of thing that will execute without a single wasted cycle, rock solid, outlasting even the human race. But instead, I aim to get as much as I can done before the customer, you know, asks for their money back. Shitty programming: it's my religion, and it pays good too.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
One of our tests that we give a candidate is presenting them with a PC that has it's cover off.
Wow, that's a really low bar to set for employment. I'm not sure I want to work for someone who attracts people that totally clueless for interviews that they need to test whether or not a person can run Winmsd.
If your primary goal is to make lots of money, look into business, not technology.
Oh, that explains it. You pay shit for wages. No wonder you can't find quality candidates.
Just get the FSCK out.
(Funny Slashdot Comment Kit)
- a.c.
What am I supposed to think when I see someone's resume where they had 3 unrelated jobs, one technical job, and another unrelated job? Is someone who has uninterrupted experience in my field better than a career-hopper? I would have said "no" a few years back, but since then we've hired someone with a resume similar to what I've described, and she's been wonderful.
I recall having this same problem a few years back as an English major with no "official" computer background. I think one of the things that gets lost is that, especially today, being a hardcore CS or certified-to-the-nines type doesn't necessarily make for a good employee. With the tools in use these days for development work, knowing exact syntax and some minutiae are less important than real basic problem-solving skills and the ability to strategize and think clearly.
Unfortunately, these seems to get forgotten constantly in the obsession with pure qualifications. Fact is, since one is quantitative (qualifications, et al.) and the other qualitative (how can you really know?) it often gets missed. But that is a general issue.
When my present boss considered hiring me at his PC-repari (Windows) shop, he read through my resume (Mostly Linux stuff ;) and said "Here's a new computer for a customer, build it." I did and have been working happily there for 3 months.
actually i would think most organizations are giving practicals now... we got burned with a "cert baby" and being govt have to live with our mistakes. Now we give practicals and it is amazing how some who interview great and have all of the paper trail cannot get past some basic realtime excercises. Usually the person who we end up hiring does not stand out initially, but on the practical shines...
"the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." -E
Minimal knowledge is what certifications are all about.
I know a guy who got his A+ cert a few months ago. Basically his preparation consisted of watching videos and reading books for about 8 hours. Books and videos focused solely on how to pass the A+ exam. From what I heard, I probably would have been able to pass without studying.
Maybe it's just me, but I believe that certs show very little about what a person knows. It's like teachers who prep the kids for standardized tests, so that the kids look really smart, but they actually don't know much at all.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I've hired about 100 programmers/analysts/dba's etc over the last thirty years; track record counts a bit, certs count a bit (but not hugely -- if someone claims a doctorate, I'll ask to read the thesis) -- screening is more intuitive to me than analytical. What counts is evidence of intelligence, enthusiasm and involvement, plus clarity in communication (and of course the ability to communicate their subject knowledge). If they can't allude to that in the application, the alphabet soup will count for exactly zero. And if I can't get an applicant waxing lyrical during their interview about a pet bit of work they've done, it's a good indication you're talking to a boat anchor. There is no substitute for brains, either in engineering or management.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
As a totally OT reply, how come you make so many people your foes here on Slashdot? I got an email today that you made me your foe...and yet I don't think I've ever even bumped into you on any of these boards posting to the same topics that I do.
So what gives? Also, why do you even make anyone a friend or a foe? I never understood that part of Slashdot.
Oh well.
Can't agree more.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Right. And you'd know this how, tell me?
I'm a team leader, and I report to the director of software development.
When we need to hire someone for my team, we do this:
My boss sends me a copy of all resumes received (and I send her a copy of ones I have independently acquired).
We both read them all and triage them into Interview, Maybe, and Forget It piles. When I say "all resumes received" I mean exactly that. HR filters out nothing. In fact, when I was hired I had absolutely no contact with HR until after the hiring decision had been made. That first contact was an offer letter. My very first contact from my employer was a phone call from my (now) boss.
People who we both put into the Interview pile get called. If one of us said Maybe and the other said Interview, we'll discuss it and may or may not call the person. If one of us said Maybe and the other said Forget it, that person doesn't get a call.
Neither of us much cares about certifications. We care about relevant experience and achievements, we care *a lot* about attitude and interest in the work, and we care *a lot* about personality fit. One of the great keys to being a successful manager and building a successful team is to hire people who don't really need to be managed. We both believe this, and that contributed a lot to my being hired. We look for interested, self-motivated people who have a passion about their work. As long as you know what you're doing, we're not all that concerned about how you got there. I don't have a CS degree, and have very little formal training in any aspect of IT (took some classes at Cisco that were paid for by a former employer, that's about it). Everything I know I learned on my own and on the job. That pretty much precludes me from working at big companies, but I don't care. Small ones are a lot more fun.
I know this technique doesn't scale to 900 resumes, and HR departments at large companies probably don't even allow that sort of thing (their loss), but if you are in a position to do it that way, looking at each resume and picking out the people you like based on your criteria (which ought not rely much on certificates) is the best way to assemble a quality staff.
Myself? It's based on whether or not I like someone's expressions of opinion.
:)
It's not really a "I hate you" + "I love you" thing for me, more of a mental tracker for whose opinions I find endearing and those whom I feel are not on my wavelength.
Don't take it personal; we're all merely cybots.
You might want to figure out why you have to interview so many and why your "see how well they answer where they want to be in 5 years and help them" is netting you the people you have.
I sure have! Many, in fact, over the years. The technique I use has been refined over many years, companies and interviews, and I have yet to find one that is better (of course, when I do, you'll bet I'll take the best elements and add it to my repertoire).
Here's my point of conducting an interview:
For bonus points,
The difference between your technique and mine is that one word: proof.
That sounds like many interviews. Have they found the right person yet? I conduct fewer interviews, because I only interview people who have a chance of doing the job. I don't waste time with resumes, either, because they are next to useless. If you don't believe that, then I have a mutual fund to sell you (ever wonder why EVERY single fund prospectus, advert, commercial, or presentation displays the words "past returns are no indication of future performance"?), cheap!
Here's how it goes: whenever someone wants to apply for a position, we tell her she has some homework to do before she can apply. We provide a general list of resources, web pages, and even phone numbers of people to call. Then we give her the general job description (i.e., "we need someone to build a portal using XSLT that provides x, y, and z services to our top 3 customers). Her assignment: identify the customers, the top competitors, and outline the general approach (pseudo-code, perhaps) as well as the advantages and disadvantages of her approach. Of the 1,000 potential applicants, maybe 5 will actually do it (about 1/2 a percent has been my experience), and we bring 'em all in and discuss their approaches. During the interview, we throw a few more actual work issues at 'em and see how they do. Finally, we have them actually interact with their future team and see how the team feels. Extend an offer to the best one (or all, if we can).
Or you can do it your way by going through all 1,000 resumes, skimming and hoping the right keywords jump out. Narrow the list down to people who look like they have "good" experience that kind-of looks like what you're doing now. Call 'em in for the interview, where you ask them what animal they'd be, where they want to be in 5 years (do you keep any superstar employees with tenure longer than 5 years?), and their greatest weakness. You might ignore the fact that most candidates (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) are lying or getting their answers out of the the Big Book of Interview Questions, because it is not about the work, is it?
Yeah, right.
Are you a self-learner or need to be spoon feed? Do you have real-world experience or are you just good at solving puzzle tests? A combination of real world experience and certifications says you are able to understand the nuances of the technology but also put it to work. What someone produces in the class room versus in the real world can be two very different things. Technical skills can be learned but there is no substitute for some one who is ready to hit the ground running. Probability the biggest factor in all this not mentioned is can the person work seamlessly in the political environment. Personality conflicts are not remedied with technical skill. Usually unless all are committed to working things out some will have to leave. Since certifications don't involve communication with more than a book or test they fail to judge effectiveness of working with others which can be the biggest determinate if the project is going to be successful. Arguing over the best approach or technology for a product are so counter productive that it can undermine the whole project while some with ownership into a project with product ten times more and be totally committed to improving their skills.
First off, if she can't read the goddamn silk screening on the card and realize that she didn't buy a proper card shows that all of the training in the world isn't going to do anything for her if she can't stop and comprehend what she's doing.
Second off, yes, headless is hard, but i was quite assuming that she was quite trained and educated at this point. I know otherwise because she was just hired to work at the same call centre whorehouse I work at.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.