Slashdot Mirror
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 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!
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.
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.
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.