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Red Hat Announces Certified Architect Curriculum
Anonymous Coward writes "Red Hat announced a new advanced certification today, Red Hat Certified Architect. One training expert, however, cautions that Red Hat certifications can lock administrators in to Red Hat-specific skills."
redhat certs tend to train one to do everything the "redhat recommended way" using custom redhat scripts and utilities and following redhat specific conventions, and thus ones acquired skills are not portable to many other common and standard *nix platforms
well, yes. when you get certified for a particular distro, you're going to get informed about *that* distro and no other. fortunately, for most human beings, learning one thing does not outright prevent them from learning other things.
-ninjaneer
While I agree with you, I'm also not sure I want to be handing people the title of Engineer - I went to school for 5 years to earn that, and it shouldn't take a month and $400.
And the MSCE and other qualifications don't?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Since when is locking people into ANYTHING a good thing?
You and me both (school wise, I mean). I appreciate what MSCEs have learned, just not sure if it's as valuable as it's made out to be.
If you take certification classes, and that locks you into a particular distro, then it's your own fault. There's really no excuse for not doing your homework, be it in RH certification classes or at home reading the Gentoo manuals.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
No they can't. Knowing a Red Hat-specific technique does not prevent you from learning other ways of doing things.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Distro nuts need not apply.
You are perceiving the issue through a mirrot. The primary complaint is not from distro nuts, but choice nuts.
Yes, that would include the choice not to use Linux.
KFG
Don't mock the bottom rung on a ladder - can be very useful in it's own way
As long as it is about LINUX then you can apply same skils on any distribution, GUI may be different. Most of the time it is CLI that is used and it is almost same on all distributions.
I've never been a big fan of certifications, but...
Engineering is an awfully big camp. What kind engineer are you? Railroad? Civil? Computer? I wouldn't get so worked up over it. It's only a title, after all, and it does contain Red Hat in it, so it's narrowed down for you already.
And Microsorft skills are more general???? Unless you are running scripts that you don't even understand I don't see how the skills a unix sysadmin on any platform and a linux sysadmin on any distro could learn would be unportable to others. There are things that surprise me on one system or another, but isn't that what man and apropos are for.
I agree. With architect and engineer (and doctor, lawyer, etc.) there are requirements and licensing programs in place. With a slew of network engineers and software architects coming from colleges and these certification programs, people are quickly deceived by all the titles and certifications. The fact is, an MCSE is not an engineer.
We require a professional license for these other occupations because of how easy it is to be conned, and because of how much damage they can do. I consider some computer-related occupations to be just as dangerous.
The problem is this: Where you can teach yourself C and learn your networking at home in your basement, you cannot become a doctor through self-education. So a licensing program for computer professionals would have to account for the self-taught. I don't think it will happen.
Ummm. Like MSCE et al doesn't trap you into their skills?
That would be your fault for being a dumb cunt and installing an unsupported file system type. Dont blame red hat for your poor sysadmin skills.
On the other hand, licensing is also used to reduce the number of competitors by creating barriers to entering a profession. These barriers are not always based on the public good but sometimes on private greed.
I think the Red Hat certs are very useful, and even portable. The test is surprisingly hard; you can know your stuff and still fail, but you can't possibly pass if you're not very familiar with Linux. I took the RHCE exam this past Friday. And passed. Which was a relief, because I failed it the first time.
RHCE is definitely a test about doing things. You can't read the guides they give you and be done with it. Studying involves setting up every service and configuration they discuss in class, and remembering how to do it in the absence of your notes. Because there is no multiple choice. It's all "Fix your system," and "Configure your system to do the following."
There is some stuff in the RHCE curriculum that is RH-specific, but I think that would be true regardless of what sort of test you take. And it doesn't amount to much: most of the skills are VERY portable. OK, maybe RPM is not used by every distro, and maybe the installer is RH-specific. And I know, KDE is in the wrong directory. But where things differ, it's never too hard to figure it out. I've done plenty of things I learned in these classes on other distros. Of course there are also a lot of Red Hat utilities you can use to configure services, but they're not really taught in class, believe it or not. Red Hat recommends that students learn the command line way of doing things first. Most admins don't use the GUI config tools, so RH pretty much skips them.
I'd imagine the Architect curriculum must be pretty good, based upon my RHCE experience. Particularly the "Directory Services and Authentication" class, which would be useful if you wanted to do clever things with Samba/LDAP/Kerberos.
So who would you rather employ, someone who knows how to use redhat-config-* (or system-config-* as they are now known), or someone who knows how to edit each of the corresponding config files
As a matter of fact, RHCE track GLS instructors teach vi, scripting, and configuration by editing directive files directly. Having actually taken the RHCE, I can attest to the fact that not only was there no time to install the GUI tools (it's optional), one may be hard pressed to find the time to even use them (the test requires you to deliver A LOT in very LITTLE time).
No, believe it or not, the redhat-config-* tools are geared more for beginer users and Windows transpants. True Red Hat hackers are adept with a shell as the next Deb, Slack, or BSD user.
Most of you zealots have no idea what it takes to make an MCSE, for that matter.
about $5500.00 plus 4 weeks of your time.
I know, we sent 5 people here from IT to that course. they all came back MCSE certified after they tested, one had to retest and the school/company we sent them to said that if he did not pass a third time they would refund all testing fees.
are they better? nope. you can't certify troubleshooting skills. and you CAN crank out people to pass certifications quite easily by teaching them the test.
and yes this is a national chain of technical training "schools" I sent them to.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.