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Are IT Certifications Meaningless?
superflippy writes "In his article Hiding Behind Certification, MIT's Michael Schrage argues that CIOs who rely too heavily on certifications as a measure of an employee or sub-contractor's abilities are wasting their companies' money."
here here! by the time you have gone through the hoops and mastered their little quizzes, much has become irrelevant and you are out of touch with the issues in your particular workplace. what ever happened to being able to give a decent discussion to determine what is important in an employee? have management become so out of touch that they no longer know what questions to ask?
Wow, this article finally affirms what I've always known -- that I'm uber-qualified. I have no certifications, degrees, or qualifications of any sort. I am totally 733T! Thank god, I had almost started to believe the nay-sayers.
Oh, and you know how Einstein got bad grades in school? Yeah, well mine are even worse!
There's no certification for being able to handle an akward system administrator who throws a hissy fit every time you misunderstand him but whom you still rely on to gt your job done. It's the people skills that count for a lot more in many ways. Any old eejit could learn how to fix as network. Not everyone can influence the powers that be to get it done when they're not motivated to do so.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
IAALS.
As I am sure many will agree (and say here), MSCE consists mainly of buying the books and decent memorization skills.
To paraphrase someone else:
"If you gotta' ask, you ain't never gonna' know"
Ads are broken.
As far as I'm concerned the only thing a certification will get you is a job. It looks good to bosses on your resume. But if you're boss was smart enough, they'd know what to look for... which in my opinion would render most certifications meaningless.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
That unless you have bags and bags of experience and a lengthy CV, your resume is rarely indicative of your true employable skills. The 8-year old Indian kid who got his MCSE is easy proof of this.
I find some cert courses are good for teaching the fundamentals, rather than proving expertise. I'm studying for a CCNA right now, and while I doubt it'll prove practical for a low level sysadmin job, it is certainly giving me the base networking knowledge required to further pursue a career in network technology...
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Organization certification such as that with ISO 9000 or SEI's Capability Maturity Model forces you into a role where projects you take on affect your certification. I recall one subcontractor who had a CMM level 5 rating; the company produced absolute garbage, but goodness, did they ever produce it so well. They had level 5.
What was especially telling was when we let them go. Their only defense? "But we're CMM Level 5!" They had no idea that process quality was completely separate from product quality.
I just graduated from a smallish high school earlier this month, and our technology program consisted of one class: ROP Computer Systems Management.
Over three years, I had about six different teachers, due to budget problems (in California). The one we had the longest started us on track for an MCSE. Just about everybody in the class got their MCP in Windows 2000 that year, and when I realized how inept a lot of my fellow classmates were, I lost faith in (at least Microsoft's) certifications.
"I can't get my e-mail."
"Why not?"
"The screen's messed up."
"How is the screen messed up?"
"It just went blank."
"Have you tried downloading another graphics driver?"
"How do you do that?"
That's a "Microsoft Certified Professional" talking. Pathetic.
If I interview a candidate for an IT position that has relied heavily on certification, and uses his or her certification repertoir as the one main reason I should hire them, I immediately get suspicioius.
That only tells me that that person needs to go through the traditional courses to learn new things and chances are he/she won't be an ingenious innovator who can improvise good solutions to non standard problems.
So far I've been right.
Every time I've decided to hire a certification trained person (regardless of college degrees) I've ended up with people unable to think outside the box.
I don't want to generalize here, but I've seen the pattern.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
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 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.
I was going to reply to this, but I don't have my SCIWE (Slashdot certified insightful writing engineer) certification.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
In one aspect, we can all thank Microsoft for this one with their MCSE mills which turned out a bunch of talentless mouse jockeys. Mind you, not ALL are talentless...but a lot I knew from the boom were. This had the unfortunate effect of taining a bunch of people who really didn't care about much more than dollar signs.
Now, I know a lot of people who have, as a result of articles such as this, let their certifications expire...which I think is a bad idea in some cases.
The problem with certifications is that in many cases they have been overvalued by the people who get burned by hiring the talentless paper monkeys. Unfortunately, certifications are still required in many cases to get through the HR vortex.
However, if certification is used as a minimum baseline of knowledge, it can at least determine a minimum amount of knowledge required. It should be part of a set of tools used to gauge the quality of a candidate, and leveraged by the employer as part of a further interview process.
I'm standing in defense of certifications, partly because I renewed my CCDP and am working on my Solaris 9 certs. Exciting? Not really, but there is still a minimum amount of knowledge required, at least conceptually. To me, it's a validation of my experience that I can at least still learn something. At a minimum, I'm trainable...and familiar with concepts that the application/hardware vendor wants me to know.
Now, for the other tools...it depends on who really controls the interviews. Awhile ago in the network analysis team where I used to work, there was one particularly brilliant hardass. His only interview question was to hand the candidate a dry-erase marker and draw out their home network and explain how it worked, was addressed, and protected. As far as he was concerned, the group needed a net geek, and someone who didn't have their own network at home wouldn't be interested in the job enough to excel. Anyways, I digress...
The hardest test I've taken to date was the CWNA, which really threw me for a loop...and I dread the CWSP which I want to take by the end of the summer.
Take three candidates with roughly the same experience: one has nothing more than a high school diploma, another a college degree, and the other has a 4-year degree and some certifications...HR is likely going to pick the third candidate. Sorry folks...that's just how it is in the business world.
(CCNP - CCDP - CWNA - A+/Net+)
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
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.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Well, let's see, it's 11 A.M. I guess that means I'd be getting out of the shower to refill my beer mug.
KFG
My boyfriend and I are barely living about the poverty line. Some really good months when I get extra hours at my day job, and the fast food place I work at on the side needs me to cover an extra shift, and his customers feel like actually tipping him for delivering their pizzas, sure, we can squeeze into the very lower middle class, but usually we're scrambling to just pay bills and eat well. And even for the breif moment we are in the lower middle class, all that usually means is buying new black pants and white undershirts and socks because they're ripped and have holes.
What does that mean? It means that neither of us have $150 per class to even work on our gen eds at the community college (I could hardly even fit a class into my two job schedule right now.) We certainly don't have $500-$1000 to pull out of our asses to get MCSEs, MSCDs, and whatever else wants to be the cool certification this week, even though both of us could certainly pass if we bought a book and bought the software. Spending just $300 each last summer to get A+ certified about broke the bank!
But there's the other trick to breaking into the IT "industry." We need to keep our software current. An MCSE and MSCD would do both of us some good, but how can we do that when all I own is a Windows 98 SE liscense and all he owns is a Windows XP Home liscense? Neither of us can certainly afford to shell out the money to get Windows Server 2003 so that we can get experience.
It's a vicious cycle. Both of us are trapped in crap jobs because we don't make enough to educate ourselves to even get considered for interviews for better jobs that would pay enough that we could keep current. A lot of good both of our excellent GPAs from high school did us. Employers won't even give me a chance to show them my coding skill, and they won't give my boyfriend a chance to show his administration skill.
In the end, it's a plug for free software. I could kick some ass as a developer if an employer needed someone to code QT, but no one uses QT. Somehow people got on the bandwagon of shit that is Win32. Now, if you want MySQL skills, sure. SQL Server 2000? Dream on. Even at my day job, my boss refuses to upgrade from 6.5 since it costs too much. Visual Basic .NET. I'd love to. They all tell me it's finally become a real programming language. Too bad. I'm stuck in Visual Basic 6 at my day job for the same reason.
It really doesn't matter to employers that I have the methods and attitudes that produce good products. All that matters is that I threw money at some college to give me one piece of paper, and then I threw money at some other business to get more pieces of paper.
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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
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.
I see a bunch of folks in this thread talking about how certifications and education are worthless, because they're quickly obsoleted in the fast paced, quickly changing world of IT. I call bullshit. Most certifications are worthless because the cert's exam questions become compromised rendering the test invalid. The people running the GMAT manage to put out a new test every thirty days, I don't understand why MS, Novell, and Cisco can't do the same thing.
For that matter, I've never understood why people are happy to post their "braindumps" of memorized exam questions on the Internet. The people you're feeding answers to are the same people you're going to be competing with for jobs. You're flooding the same market you want to compete in!
I've been in the fast, quickly changing world of IT since 1993, and for all that's changed, many "tried and true" tricks still work. They might need to be updated, but the concepts are similar. For example, suppose back in 1994 I had a bunch of identical machines I wanted to configure quickly. I'd pull out the old laplink cables, pull out my special floppy that would copy the disk from my working configured "master" to the "clones". In 2003, I use a network and Ghost software, but it's pretty much the same. In 1996, I made a firewall with a floppy disk and an old 386. I needed a router in a pinch a few weeks ago, and I made one with a bootable linux CD.
In IT, understanding a few basic concepts will get you a long way. Until earlier this year, I'd never touched Windows XP - we hadn't used it at work, and I have Macs at home. But when a few Windows XP computers showed up in the office and on customer's desktops during support sessions, did I throw my hands up and whine, "Omigod! The fast pace of the quickly changing field of IT has obsoleted my skills and left me behind!" No, I didn't - I applied what I'd learned from previous Microsoft operating systems and *I* *figured* *it* *out*.
If you took someone off the street and taught him Windows NT 4.0 inside and out, then gave him a computer with XP or Server 2003 on it, it's not like he's going to be completely lost because the tech blew right past him. He can take the skills he's already picked up, and apply them as he learns a new system. Same thing with certifications. If I've been using and am certified on Netware 4 (and I mean CNE-level, not a CNA), then I'll probably be able to get the hang of Netware 5 pretty quickly, even if my certificate doesn't say so.
A certification, or any sort of technical training is valuable if you learn its main lesson - how to think when looking at a particular manufacturer's products. If you think the goal of the certification process is the piece of paper, you've missed the whole point. The problem with most technical cetification testing programs is how easily they can be "gamed". Someone who's learned what's really supposed to be taught by the certification process is invaluable. Someone who's memorized the answers off a few dozen braindump sites will be near useless.
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I just finished interviewing and doing follow-up email ( this last part got me the job! ). There were two interviews, in the first one I met my potential future coworkers. They checked my experience, asked a few light technical questions, and then I was scheduled to interview with the director of the IT Solutions dept. Well, I was expecting a simple interview where they would check me out for corporate culture fit, but instead I was given a hypothetical enterprise network management problem, and told to explain how I would solve it step by step.
I did this by drawing my solution on the whiteboard and then later coding a bit of it on a piece of paper. I walked through the psuedocode part and then explained/justifyed each line of the actual code. It was very grueling experience, and at the end the director told me what he liked and did not like about it. The next day, I did a follow-up email to the interview, filled in the holes in my earlier solution, and the director called me back almost immediately after I sent the email, telling me that it was an awesome solution to the problem.
A few days after that I was told I had that job...
Lesson learned - Experience, certifications, and schooling can get you in the door, but be ready to be put on the spot once you are in there.
I have seen people bs their way into technical jobs and on the strength of their certs/degrees, but I don't think that really works anymore. Companies run lean and mean these days, so they try and get the most for their money.
Anyone else have a different recent experience?
I can't afford a sig!
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).
MCSE Certification
...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.
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 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.
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.
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.
As the old saying goes, what do you call a doctor that graduated from the worst medical school on earth at the bottom of his class?
Doctor.
There is also another saying... If the bare minimum wasn't the bare minimum, then it wouldn't be the bare minimum.
Would an employer rather have a network ace than a trained guy for the same price? Absolutely--of course he would. Would that same employer keep a trained guy on the payroll that returns his worth in pay? Again, absolutely--your assumption is that every employer has unrestricted access to a bunch of talented net geeks.
I'm not saying I'm disagreeing w/ all of your post, but to say that all certs is a "joke" is a gross overstatement.
G-Force music visualization
This, my friend, is life.
MCSE:Security... I was trying to come up with a punch line for that, but it pretty much holds its own.
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.
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.
...certs are likely to be a liability. When we interview a candidate, the things we look at are practical experience, apparent knowledge, attitude and the most important factor; passion. If the person has his own network at home, or maintains her own website with custom code, or got fed up with a commercial app and wrote their own replacement, then they are likely to get hired. Nine times out of ten, those folks don't have any certs.
Based on most of our interviews (not all), we've seen that the people with certs are probably the worst candidates. They are usually arrogant pricks who think they should run the department, or they are clueless dorks who can't find the on switch. One of our tests that we give a candidate is presenting them with a PC that has it's cover off. We ask the person to identify as many components as possible. Without fail, most (again, not all) of the people with certs do miserably on this part of the interview. They can't tell you what kinds of slots are on the motherboard, or what kind of ports are on the back of the system. They can't tell you what expansion cards (if any) are in the system, or even identify the CPU. Some of them even make the egregious mistake of calling the box itself a CPU. But the people without certs usually have a pretty good idea of what a PC is made of.
Where passion is concerned, we usually ask our candidates to tell us about their pet projects at home. It's rare, but occasionally we'll find someone who is just as into computers as we (managment) are. This one guy had fourteen servers at home, including one Sun SPARC box and a DEC Alpha box. When asked to name file systems for OSes, not only did he mention Unix file systems before Windows file systems, but he actually knew VMS' file system as well. Now THAT'S passion.
Attitude will get you far, if it's right for the job you're applying for. We look for people who know computers well, but are confident enough to keep quiet about it. Hotdogging will get you nowhere, except maybe a pink slip. Claiming that you know more than you do will make you look foolish. Keeping your nose to the grindstone will get you advancement. And IF you decide to go get a certification of some kind, we'll applaude that, but don't expect to be treated any differently. Arrogance is always an unpleasant trait and is the number one reason we DON'T hire, certification or not.
We had some idiot with a ton of Microsoft certifications come in. To begin with, he completely failed the PC test. He couldn't tell if the system had ISA or PCI slots. He only knew NTFS and FAT as file systems. He still had the attitude that he could "whip this place into shape" even after flunking the PC test! He only had certs and no practical experience. This is your typical candidate with certs, especially MS certs. Needless to say, he didn't get the job. I imagine he probably conned someone else into hiring him. More than likely for some "suit" position that pretends to be a technical position.
Which leads me to one of my last points: Where I work, EVERYONE (managment included) has to be able to operate our systems. This goes all the way from our department head to the lowest grunt on the totem pole. This includes, not just Windows servers, but OpenVMS servers, Cisco network devices, Sun servers, Tru64 servers, HP-UX servers and Linux servers. No one is exempt from crawling under a desk to troubleshoot a PC problem. We maintain a network of thousands of people, millions of users and millions of items to track in inventory with only three main admins and six technicians and we do it pretty well.
I'm not saying that certs are bad, per se. But if you are going out to interview, put them on the resume, but downplay their significance and emphasize the knowledge you acquired outside of your cert studies. If you didn't learn anything outside of cert classes or books and you don't play with this stuff in your spare time, consider looking in a different field. If your primary goal is to make lots
Un-news
I 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.