The IT Certs That No Longer Pay Extra

snydeq writes "Overall employment in tech is improving, but the certs you could once count on for a job or extra pay are losing their value, InfoWorld reports. 'Businesses no longer value what are increasingly considered standard skills, and instead are putting their money both into a new set of emerging specialties and into hybrid technology/business roles.'"

Comments

Hybrid Programmer-BusinessAnalyst Roles

[sanman2]

I think that the ability to succeed in a hybridized programmer-businessanalyst role depends on how complex the business and its processes are, as well as how complex its IT platforms are. If you're a more simpler company with simpler business processes and simpler platforms, then it's doable. But if you're in a complicated business environment with complex IT infrastructure, then creating these hybridized roles is asking for trouble.

Re:Hybrid Programmer-BusinessAnalyst Roles

[MightyMartian]

Just like how business graduates leveraged fast talking with dick wagging! And look at those guys. They get million dollar bonuses while the companies they pilot crashland into the ground and investors feel somewhere between gang-raped and immolated.

Re:Hybrid Programmer-BusinessAnalyst Roles

[Anonymous Coward]

which means: Instead of hiring two people good at working together to manage it, one is hired at half the pay to do double the work!

Re:Hybrid Programmer-BusinessAnalyst Roles

[pooh666]

btw, this BS term, its real meaning, has been true since back in the pocket protector days. Just more of stupid infowadd trying to come up with something that sounds new out of the same old.. Ah duh I need to know about the business to program and build systems for it. YES like as it ALWAYS has been.

Re:Hybrid Programmer-BusinessAnalyst Roles

[Kjella]

It's the good old "jack of all trades" vs "master of one" all over again, and I call bullshit. The largest companies I've seen have had business liaisons and IT liaisons and the business divisions were trying to align their demands and the IT divisions (central + specialized) trying to align their deliveries and the idea that one person could do everything was ridiculous. It's got nothing to do with being capable, it's that time is limited and one resource can only cover so much ground while staying updated on the technology, the business needs, the organization and plans and everything else that's constantly shifting. You need specialization and communication, the latter is obviously important so you don't get "islands" that act on their own but thinking everyone should be generalists is just as flawed.

Re:Hybrid Programmer-BusinessAnalyst Roles

[CodeBuster]

As for investors, don't invest. Problem solved.

They didn't ask us taxpayers whether or not we wanted to "invest", they just take our money and give it to worthless losers instead. So I agree with your sentiment in principle, but unfortunately things are rarely that simple here in the real world.

Re:Hybrid Programmer-BusinessAnalyst Roles

[JaredOfEuropa]

Not everyone should be generalists, sure. However, IT in the past decade or two has in fact shifted towards the idea that everyone should be specialists, and that's wrong as well. Not just for small outfits where people will fill several roles out of necessity; it's true even in large corporations that can afford to retain numerous specialists. Some of those large corporations now see an increasing need for generalists who are able to keep an overview of the tech landscape as well as the business landscape. You don't just need communication between the various specialists and between it and the business, you need coordination, and for that, neither a manager nor a specialist will suffice; you'll need a generalist techie with good business knowledge as well.

Being such a generalist can be a great deal of fun (it's what I currently do), but there is a snag. Good generalists are hard to find, perhaps because so many choose to specialise. It takes a good deal of searching to fill a generalist position, or one has to tailor the role slightly to the person that one finds, which goes directly against the idea of ever increasing specialisation, and the parameterisation and compartimentalisation of IT work. As a results, generalist roles are often poorly understood and perceived to be hard to manage. The work's great and if you do it well, everyone will wonder how they ever did without having someone like you. But in my own experience it is very hard to carve out an actual career for yourself this way. For the aforementioned reasons, not because there is no need for generalists.

By the way, the trend towards ever deeper specialisation does not only exist in tech work; I see it happening in many other fields as well. And it isn't just the result of the maturation of professions; I suspect that there is another important factor: our managers and the methods used for running our companies. These days it's all management-by-the-numbers, spreadsheets and dashboards. The managers behind those dashboards love managing resources, but in general they hate managing people, and there is a difference.

Dev Certs are Not Worthwhile

[kramer2718]

I can't speak to networking/DBA certs, but I will say that in my experience hiring developers, programming certificates are relatively useless.

In fact, when I read a resume, I am happy to see no certificates. The developers who highlight certificates on their resumes seem to be able to parrot back technical specs, but not to think dynamically about programming problems and that is what I am more interested in.

No certificate will replace writing code on a whiteboard.

Re:Dev Certs are Not Worthwhile

[c0lo]

In fact, when I read a resume, I am happy to see no certificates.

Me too, the reason being: I appreciate persons that value their time (i.e. better do nothing - not even gain experience - than waste the time with the certification).

Article smells strongly of B.S.

[sirwired]

Take the following statement: ""Pure-play [tech] jobs are on the decline," concurs Bill Reynolds, a partner at Foote. Where once the majority of tech jobs were in technology companies, now many organizations whose business is not directly related to tech have many openings that require different skills, he says."

Bullshit. People actually working for tech companies have ALWAYS been far fewer than those that run the technology in customer IT departments. This is not some new startling trend. If you want a career in IT with high potential (as opposed to the tech industry) business skills have always been a valuable accompaniment to tech skills; the business-blind sysadmin geek has never been up for the higher reaches of IT, and never will be. Again, not a new trend that this sage wise man is now cluing us in on.

Re:Good, Because Certs Are Worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

I never got this certification hate that seems to be everywhere. If you're worried about hiring someone with certs that have no knowledge, couldn't that info be sussed out during the interview? Are you unable to ask practical application questions to weed these people out?

For someone like me, certs have gotten my foot in the door in this industry, with a company where there is plenty of room for moving up from desktop support to net/sys admin work. My hiring manager mentioned my certs and my knowledge as part of his reason for hiring me, and asked me the necessary questions to have me prove myself.

But keep hating on certs, it seems to be the thing to do.

Thank God

[Baron_Yam]

I had to get some Microsoft certifications to break into the IT world - yet I never bothered with my A+, Novell, additional MS certifications, etc. Instead, I picked up a few very specific certs here and there and specialized. Yeah, I'm useless outside my field, but I (was) a star within it. The only guy in the world doing what I did, in fact.

You know what? When I changed jobs, the new employer didn't see my inappropriate certs, they saw my star status within my specialty and assumed I could adapt to a new one and perform just as well... and now I'm getting new very specific certs in a slightly different area.

Nothing specific you learn in IT is going to matter in two years anyway, never mind ten, and the general stuff is amazingly applicable across moderate ranges of differing IT work.

Re:Good, Because Certs Are Worthless

[DigiShaman]

Hi. MCITP, MCSE, and MCDST here.

Microsoft certifications are about proof of concept and best practices along with familiarity of the product in question. That's it. It does not teach best business practices or optimization. It also doesn't teach advanced troubleshooting beyond looking up event logs and searching KB articles.

You took the test. There was nothing deceptive about them that should have astounded you. Perhaps your false expectations were raised too high? Not to be snarky here, but seriously. How does Microsoft differ from any other company's product certification in this regard?

Re:Good, Because Certs Are Worthless

[certain death]

Well said...but you should have done it without being AC. I would have modded you up! BTW, the same goes for me. I have a CISSP-ISSAP, CCSA, JNCIE, CCIE and several other "C" credentials, I don't list them on my Resume to impress the technical folks, they simply get me past the HR guys. Once I get into the technical interview, I rely on my 20+ years of actually doing the job.

Re:Easily answered

[wickedskaman]

Part of being driven is networking and getting solutions using all resources available to you.

Re:Good, Because Certs Are Worthless

[mcrbids]

I changed my interview style after that. I ask a bunch of simple nitty-gritty tech question now, no matter how impressive the candidate sounds. You would be surprised how often someone whose resume looks stellar can't answer multiple simple questions - like what is a /24, a tcp reset packet, port used by http, etc.

This oh yes this! Interviewing for programmer positions, I've seen gorgeous resumes by people with Masters in CompSci at reputable colleges and universities, with "accomplishments" like writing SQL language lexical parsers, who could not write even an approximation of a SQL query or even write a simple string replace function. (how do you get to lexical parsing without being able to manipulate strings?)

This may seem a bit provocative, but this is very consistently the case with graduates from India. Having interviewed so many such people, so often having such beautiful resumes, you'd think I could have at least found a single one with enough programming expertise that I could hire, but that's so far not yet been the case.

I really feel for these guys, because they've obviously spent lots of time/money doing something, and whatever it is that they're doing, it's not helping them much.

Re:Weighing certifications while hiring

[captbob2002]

Careful, some of us with cert may agree with you but we went out and got them in order to get past the HR weenies that throw away resumes that lack the appropriate buzzwords/acronyms.

Re:Good, Because Certs Are Worthless

[alittle158]

I remember leaving one exam thinking that if I ever encountered a Citrix-based environment, I'd spray it down with gasoline and set it on fire.

A very appropriate response