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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."
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
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
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.
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...
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.
. . . 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.
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).
...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.
ISO:9000 is a warning - those who don't heed it get what they deserve.
Also, run if you hear talk of any "Quality Management" system.
Note that they are never called "Quality Improvement" systems.
The point is not to improve quality - too high of quality costs too much - the point is to reduce the quality of work to just above the level where the customer gets fed up and goes somewhere else.
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"
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.
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.
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....
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.
This might help you in your search, but put under your education and certifications section "XXXX Pending". On some of my resumes, I listed "Microsoft and Cisco certifications pending", because I have the training and the background required to sit the exams (classroom training for Cisco and working experience along with self-study materials for MCSA/MCSE), but when asked about it in an interview, I state that my present financial situation dictates that any money coming in go towards keeping gas in my car, a roof over my head, and food in my belly. Employers should be understanding of this.
I would also recommend stashing at least 10% of your pay into a slush fund to fall back on after you move. Some employers won't consider a candidate outside the commuting area because they may want a relocation package as part of the job offer.
This is almost exactly what I've been saying for years. I'm mostly self-taught in all the fields I'm experienced in, but I do have about 9 years of experience in software development and network admin. Personally, I find that a job becomes more appealing when the HR or whoever is doing the hiring actually takes the time to look past a few pieces of paper and really digs into the meat of the job in an interview. It's kind of funny that this article showed up today, as just yesterday I took a call at work from someone trying to push MCSE/etc. I listened to his opening and flat out told him that I wasn't interested in his certifications and that I felt experience and decent management were more important to me than making a few extra dollars an hour.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
I personally think that more employers should give a short test as part of the interview, this way they can be fairly confident that the person they are hiring actually knows how to do the job.
:-( It's especially amusing when one considers that I converse with these people online quite often, but never meet one in real life. (The ones I know online are never where I am at the moment.) We must be extremely rare.
I actually did something similar when I was recently interviewing junior programmer candidates. When I noticed that they had "Masters Degree" written all over their resume, I decided to put them through the wringer and ask about various data structures and search algorithms. (Note: I never got a degree myself. Too busy actually performing the job.) I usually started with something complex like Hashtables, then went progressively simpler to Binary Searches, B-Trees, and Linked Lists. Oddly enough, no one knew how hashtables worked. One guy stuttered through so badly that he barely even managed to explain linked lists (and I wasn't tremendously happy with his explanation). The guy I ended up recommending was the one who simply said "I don't know" to the ones he didn't know, and gave detailed explanations of the ones he did know.
Of course, none of this would tell me if the guy could write *good* software. But at least I'd know that he had the basics and could be taught. If it had been a more senior position, I would have taken great care in attempting to find public examples of their work, and spend time chatting to ascertain how passionate they actually are about technology. Sadly, I can't say that I've interviewed a single person who has actually wowed me.
BTW, if you're looking for the type of API I'd demonstrate to a tech interviewer, look no farther than my GAGE gaming APIs. The API is clean, the code is simple, and the algorithms are original and unmatched. If I saw something similar out of a candidate, I would go throttle my manager until he was hired. Too bad that pretty much all senior candidates I've dealt with don't even have code to show.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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 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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.