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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?