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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?
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.
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IAALS.
As I am sure many will agree (and say here), MSCE consists mainly of buying the books and decent memorization skills.
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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
...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.
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+)
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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.
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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?
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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.
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.
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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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?
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
...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.
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!
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.
You didn't supply the specifics, but a lot of the old school mechanical repair guys have/had a very subtle and intuitive grasp of problem solving and creative solutions. Boilers might not be F16s, but you can bet that F16 had manuals for every part.
Repairing a 40-year old Russian boiler successfully has got to be tougher than following the pretty flowchart in the manual for swapping out bad-for-good using a warehouse full of milspec parts.
I've had fun watching some military types (AF, usually) get completely boggled by the lack of structure in some corporate IT shops. As if it is anyone's fault but their's that they can't figure out how to get anywhere.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
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.
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This, my friend, is life.
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.
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.
> what kind of questions do you ask for in determining an applicant's character, pride in work, and initiative?
I get them talking about their previous projects. If I detect some enthusiasm, then that's good, but if I get the impression that thay've never cared about anything they've done, then that's bad.
I ask them to tell me about a project that didn't go as well as they would have liked, then I ask what they would have done differently. If they don't have a ready answer to the first part, then it means they are not assessing their work, and if they can't answer the second part, then they're not learning, or thinking about how to improve.
I also ask them to tell me about one of their favorite projects, or greatest successes. Then, I ask them what, in retrospect, they would have done differently, or better. If they have a ready answer to the second part of that question, i.e. if they have thought about how to improve on even their best work, then I have an very good candidate on my hands.
Another thing I like to do is to get them talking about programming techniques and standards. Again, if they are enthusiastic about what they are descibing, then that's a good sign. If they can describe things in a manner that is clear and well organized, then that's good for a number of reasons. Not only does it show clear thinking, but it shows consideration for the listener, and, if their verbal communication is organized, then there's a good chance their code will be too. I like it even better if they pull out some paper and start making diagrams to illustrate what they are saying.
When talking about standards and techniques (e.g. whether/when to use global variables, the use of naming standards, etc.) it doesn't matter too much whether the candidate's ideas agree with my own. What matters much more is whether the candidate has an answer ready, and can explain the reasons behind that answer. I want to see that the candidate has thought about such issues, and that they are confident about their own ideas. When their ideas agree with mine, then that's okay, but in some ways I like it better when they don't, because then I can learn more about the candidate. When I describe how my ideas, or our shop standards, are different from theirs, then their reaction tells me quite a bit. If they lose their confidence, and/or become defensive, then that's a bad sign. If they seem to understand my description of our approach, and appear that they can accept it, then that's fine (these things are more a matter of optimization, rather than one right answer, so simply having a standard is more important than which standard you choose, and a good candidate will understand that). On the other hand, if they want to debate with me a little, then that's fine too -- I'm happy to have people who will stand behind their ideas, as long as I don't get the impression that it's simply out of stubbornness (if I get nervous about that, then I will ask straight out whether they will have any trouble following our approach).
I hope I've answered your question. Obviously the above is not a complete list -- there are other factors to consider, as any article on interviewing will tell you. For example, if the candidate spends most of the interview complaining about how his previous managers and co-workers screwed up his work, then that's probably not a good sign.
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.
Does this really speak to the certs? I think it speaks more toward the attitude. "I know something big will happen, so instead of POINTING IT OUT to him and HELPING HIM GAIN EXPERIENCE, I'd rather let him fall on his ass because he only got this job because he has a cert". Did you *try* to help this guy to get into the groove, or did you just fix it?
I mean, he might have been unqualified, and he might just have been a moron who memorized some test questions, but as you so eloquently put, experience counts for much more. But how do you gain experience if the people in the company won't help you out?
"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.
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To the curious: Louis Armstrong's answer to the question "What is Jazz?"
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.
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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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
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.
A few years ago we hired a PC/Network Tech. Any resume with an MCSE on it went straight to the round file.
Thank God for them... I'd not want to work for a company that is too arrogent to realize that not everyone out there with talent can afford long hours and college tuitions while trying to support themselves with a full time job.
Certs aren't great but to blacklist anyone with one is a sign that your company isn't serious about the best employee but rather about touting that your staff is only made of college graduates.
Being a non college graduate myself I can tell you that these kids with their degrees have nothing on a few years of experience, certs or no certs.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
And I sincerely hope that after firing the CNE, the owner also fired your sorry ass.
You were miffed that they hired someone with paper qualifications and no experience, so you decided on your own initiative:
to quietly fix errors made by the new guy, rather than talking to him and helping him gain that vaunted experience you're so proud of,
to not talk to your manager/the owner about the problems the new guy was having/causing,
that the company should suffer several days of server downtime because you didn't like their hiring decision.
Did I miss anything? Incidentally, I note that the other two guys in your IT department couldn't fix the server while you were gone. Maybe management had the right idea, trying to hire someone with qualifications--what if their resident expert was unavailable over a long weekend, eh?
Hypothetical question to hiring managers: would you prefer an employee who makes honest mistakes, or one that will let the network go down for several days out of spite? (The correct answer is c: Go back to the resume pile and find someone else.)
~Idarubicin