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Why Certifications Are Necessary (Even If Aggravating To Earn)
Nerval's Lobster writes: Whether or not certifications have value is a back-and-forth argument that's been going on since before Novell launched its CNE program in the 1990s. Developer David Bolton recently incited some discussion of his own when he wrote an article for Dice in which he claimed that certifications aren't worth the time and money. But there's a lot of evidence that certifications can add as much as 16 percent to a tech professional's base pay; in addition a lot of tech companies use resume-screening software that weeds out any resumes that don't feature certain acronyms. There's also the argument that the cost, difficulty, and annoyance of earning a certification is actually the best reason to go through it, especially if you're looking for a job; it broadcasts that you're serious enough about the technology to invest a serious chunk of your life in it. But others might not agree with that assessment, arguing that all a certification proves is that you're good at taking tests, not necessarily knowing a technology inside and out.
First off.. saw first link and thought "wow, at least dice isn't putting campaign ID's in their URLs any more".. but then the third link has one. Never change dice.. never change.
Secondly, this is a tired old discussion that aside from a few who insist on actually arguing it, seems to have resolved to a consensus of:
- If the employers you want to work for care about certificates, get them.
- If your employer wants you to get certificates, get them (they'll probably pay for it).
- If the employers you want to work for don't care about them, don't get them (I don't think anyone feels you actually learn something by getting certs).
The area I live in, certificates are mostly worthless, so I have very few. I once worked at a place where the big projects was from a client who insisted everyone who worked on the project have a bunch, so I got a few now expired ones through that. Maybe having certs going in would be a factor in ones favour if applying for that job at that time, but I doubt it. They were viewed much like "mandatory compliance training" stuff is, something everyone just went and wasted an afternoon on at some point because you had to.
But I don't discount that in some areas having a list of acronyms on your resume is required or at least helpful, so if you live in such an area, go nuts.
Either way, you should know what local employers in the area you want to work expect if you are planning to you know, have a career and such...
EVERY cert test I've ever taken tests not knowledge of the subject/product, but the ability to do rote memorization of the training materials, even if it's wrong. It's all a moneymaking scam.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Conspiracy theories aside, I don't get why the hell Nerval's Lobster doesn't just have an editor account. I'd really like to know what the relationship there is.
Obviously he (or she?) works for dice, everything he's ever submitted is a link to dice and the URLs have campaign IDs in them to track the success of their shitposting. Do they treat this as if it was submitted like any other article, requiring it to get upvoted in the firehose, or is it just automatically accepted by whatever editor happens to see it first?
Either way, pretty unclassy.
They are not really worthless. They get you in the door and past HR, as "CCIE ID #12345" is a lot better on a resume than "Cisco fabric experience". Similar with RHCE ID "111-1111" as opposed to "I know Linux". From there, you now have access to the tech people, which without the certs, you wouldn't even been allowed near them.
There are also jobs that require certs on the job. I worked at one place that had auditors that did spot checks, and one's certs lapsed, the IT person would be fired on the spot and escorted off the premises for something along the lines of "failure to maintain proper training for the equipment used."
No, certs don't substitute for experience, but a cert gets you in the door, far more than "gee, I learn quick."
We recently published on this site an opinion piece whose author was dismissing the usefulness of certifications.
We wanted to reassure our advertisers that the author's opinion was strictly his own, and not reflecting Dice's opinion in any way.
We at Dice are convinced that the certifications offered by our advertisers are indeed useful and even necessary.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
If you are a newbie or fresh from college, get a cert.
If you have 20+ years experience, Certs don't matter. Unless you have a clueless HR drone, then you dont want to work for the place.
If they discount your "15 years senior network administrator for AT&T" and want to see a entry level cert, then you really really dont want to work there.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Nerval's Lobster is the astroturfing account for Nick Kolakowski, the editor in chief of the godawful SlashBI thing. He's still listed in the FAQ as an editor, even though he's officially moved away from Slashdot and is currently churning out content for Dice's godawful news division. I brought this up before, and was assured that not only does Nick not work directly for Slashdot any more, but that they don't post everything that he submits. Considering the last time he had a story declined was over a year ago, I have my doubts.
Also, expect to see stories about certifications, what programming languages you should learn, interview skills, and other fluff pieces from now on.
I work as a business consultant on various IT projects. Certifications are required in my line of work.
They give points in application process when big firms and the public sector contracts us to do real projects. Even so much, that one certificate is equal to two years of work experience or more.
They have no effect on me doing my job and are all about memorizing stupid details on things I will never use. I would be more than happy if our clients would see them as a money making scam, that they really are. But such is life.
Hate 'em all you like, but silly IT managers who hire sub-contractors don't know any better.
The first fact is that this guy is technically correct. HR departments go all weak in the knees for certification. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some certification farm out there crapping out certifications in cmake.
But this completely misses the point as to the actual value a certification actually has when it comes to the reality of programming or maintaining/implementing systems. Most of us will agree that the value here is low to potentially negative. A wonderful personal example was that years ago my company asked me to become MSDN certified in something. In order to regurgitate the correct answers for the test I memorized all kinds of crap. But some of it was actually quite helpful. There were some bits about NT boot configs that suddenly made sense.
But the flaw was that I was already very good at working with NT servers. If I were in some stripmall comp collage studying this as my first exposure to computer stuff then it would have meant nothing and yet with some good studying I would have been "certified" to administer NT servers.
But where this really breaks down is when you get a shop that is completely filled with people from a certain company's certifications. I have met companies that say "We are a MSDN shop." Full stop. They won't even consider any other technology.
But my happy moment was years ago when our head of IT who had "over $20,000 worth of Novell certifications there on that wall" was installing a Novell server on his brand new shiny Dell powerhouse. But it wouldn't install. So he gets Dell tech support on the phone and ends up with their top tier who said, "We don't support that old Novell stuff anymore. If it runs on any of our machines it is luck not design. But I know for a fact that it won't run on that machine you have there." Now with this IT guy the whole development staff had long been trying to get Novell out of the building but the IT head swore by it and had a thousand defences as to why it was the best. But the day Dell said No was the day we were able to leverage that into finally getting Novell out of the building.
I have similar stories with other certifications.
So while I don't doubt that they can often increase the individual's salary and I don't doubt that the process of an existing capable user would potentially be enhanced by certification. I do suggest that the damage that is done by certifications being turned into religious scrolls could be enormous to companies that suddenly are "locked in" to a certain technology and not only stop considering alternatives but actively consider alternatives to be heresy.
This is interesting but I'd like to see some proof of it.
"(Nerval's Lobster) actually worked for us before the acquisition, writing for our standalone news site experiment. Later on he moved over to Dice and took over their news site instead.
He goes through the same submission process as everyone else, and we don't post everything he submits." source
Not everything, just 570/767 stories. All of of the current ones have at least one link back to a story on Dice. The really old ones (from 2012 or so) all link back to his own stuff at the ill-fated SlashBI
"Nerval's Lobster (nkolakowski@slashdotmedia.com, nkolakowski@geek.net) submissions start to show up. We've [slashdot.org] already [slashdot.org] established [slashdot.org] that Nerval's Lobster is Nick Kolakowski, a slashdot employee submitting paid content as user-submitted stories"source (with lots more interesting comments linked)
See also: The Slashdot FAQ which lists him as Slashdot editor, his Twitter profile which lists him as a Slashdot editor, homepage which lists him as a senior Slashdot editor, Google+ page (same), LinkedIn (same), and so on and so on.
So, yes, can we stop with the charade already?
Okay Nerval or whichever Dice employee you are you're just embarrassing yourself and your company now, please, just stop.
Certainly in the development world, no one who actually has these roles you're theorising about gives the slightest shit about certifications. I can say this with absolute certainty because I've made it right to the top in a large and successful company without needing any and similarly when I'm hiring I pay exactly zero attention to certifications because they do not in any way tell you anything about the competency of the candidate.
You see the issue is that anyone can get these certifications, so your theory of who can and can't get them is meaningless, even junior devs can get them if they can be arsed, but ultimately they're just not worth the money. They have exactly zero impact on employability (and some even have negative impact).
So keep theorising all you want, those of us who actually work in the field and have worked our way to the top will keep laughing at how wrong you are and how desperate your shilling is. Even if I genuinely wasn't capable of getting these certifications, I frankly wouldn't care, because it's had no impact whatsoever in my ability to grow my career, hence even if you were right (which you're not) so fucking what? It's still meaningless, they still don't matter, not having them still hasn't dragged my pay down at all because I'm already getting paid as much as a developer can get paid, and I still enjoy my job regardless. There isn't any other metric that matters that these certifications could improve even if they did somehow matter as you're desperately trying to claim.
Really, it sounds like you're the bitter one simply because you blew all your money on certifications and have no actual skills so the only person you could find to employ you was Dice. I guess it must suck being in a dead end Dice job, but at least you have your pointless and irrelevant bits of paper to flap around right?