Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat's Certification Program Questioned
unitron writes
"Nobody loves you when you're not down and out,
apparently. A not overly long article
in the business section of today's (4/16) News and
Observer talks about how Red Hat's certification program
is getting them compared (unfavorably) to Microsoft,
mentions the fears of some that certification efforts
will become fragmented and also discuses the Linux
Professional Institute certification program plans. "
I see two problems with a Red-Hat-Linux-specific certification:
1) Certification changes for the worse the way skills are evaluated.
In the absence of certification, employers have no way to evaluate prospective employees' skills except the hard way. This may amount to probation periods for new hires, practical demonstrations of skill (fix this busted server and we'll hire you), or simply bringing trusted technical employees into the interview process.
In the presence of certification, employers tend to evaluate skills the easy way -- on the basis of certifications. This leads them to undervalue an employee who lacks certifications, and to overvalue one who has them. Both are errors, potentially grievous ones. The former harms both employee and employer; the latter mostly harms the employer.
Well-marketed certifications give employers the impression that they can safely rely on the certification as a credential, whether or not it is actually worthwhile. This is the nature of marketing -- just as ubiquitous marketing is able to make an inferior product such as Windows NT into "the standard", it is able to make an inferior or useless certification into "a standard". Naturally, once it is established as a "standard", employees are virtually required to obtain it.
The hazard for the certifying authority is this: if a certification can be made into a de-facto "standard", then the employment market for the relevant skillset becomes recursively dependent on that certification, and the certifying authority gets to ride the gravy train, while dragging the employment market through the dirt -- harming both employer and employee in the long run. This is arguably what Microsoft has done with the MCSE.
While there may seem to be little risk of such a degradation in the Linux employment market at present, it is certainly a possibility in the long run. To prevent this, it is in everyone's interest that employers get used to evaluating skills the hard way, even if they use certifications as part of this process. My recommendation is to bring trusted technical staff into the process of evaluating prospective hires. Who is better to tell you whether the candidate is qualified?
2) A Red-Hat-specific certification encourages, even without malice, Red Hat dominance.
Though Red Hat may have exactly zero imperialist or Microsoft-like intentions, it remains the case that if employers start accepting a Red Hat certification as a "standard" certification for Linux, it may be expected that they will follow this up by preferring Red Hat over other distributions. This will encourage software producers to fixate on Red Hat Linux as a "standard", as I have discussed elsewhere.
Further, because Red-Hat-specific skills will be expected of most people seeking Linux-related employment, a person seeking to maintain or develop skills on other distributions will be at a disadvantage, time-wise, to one who focuses solely on Red Hat Linux.
Finally, market dominance is in the business interests of any corporation; that's just what corporations do. "Every frustum longs to be a cone, and every vector dreams of matrices"* -- and every corporation wants to boost its stock value, even those which aren't publicly traded (yet). A certification may, in time, become another tool of this process -- again, with no hostile or imperialist intent on the part of the people at Red Hat.
* Stanslaw Lem, Cyberiad.
Once again, the press fears the ominous spectre of another empire rising the ashes of a smoldering, outdated MS.
Once again, rampant paranoia and delusion reign supreme in the press. I for one, am not shocked.
What choices did Red Hat had for providing certification? With no community organizations doing anything until _very_ recently, Red Hat decided to start training people so that Linux could get in the workplace, on resumes, and gain some desparately needed corporate credibility.
They blazed their own trial in this matter because there was no path made yet. They certify Red Hat Linux because that's what they are experts in. If history serves true, Red Hat would happily sponsor the community certification movement mentioned-certification is certainly outside their business.
Once again, why should Red Hat be attacked for choosing to do something by themselves when no coherent community efforts were availiable in a usable state ( cf. LSB )
All this paranoia about Red Hat is absurd.
First off, Red Hat is a tiny company. Anybody who compares Red Hat to Microsoft does not have a good grip on history. Microsoft from the day it was born was a mean, vicious company. As an example, in the TRS-80 days (yes, I am that old!) they offered a BASIC compiler and if you wrote applications with it you had to pay Microsoft a 9% royalty on your sales to license the runtime libraries! At the time, Microsoft was about the same size as Red Hat is today.
Red Hat by comparison has commited to only having free software in their distribution. They fund important work for the community like GNOME, Rasterman, and Alan Cox.
Second, what else could Red Hat certify? They only know Red Hat. What if you wanted a Red Hat centric certification? How else could you get it?
Lastly, there is nothing wrong with certification. A license to practice medicine is a certification, a college degree is a certification, a driver's license is a certification. The world is full of them. It doesn't mean everything, but it does mean something. If I see that you are certified, I know that you at least attended some classes. It doesn't mean that you know everything, but it does mean that you know something.
My computer, my way. Linux
--
Howard Roark, Architect
Howard Roark, Architect
I believe in a Man's right to exist for his own sake.
It is also true that each distro has its own particular quiks, features, installation routines, and default setup. Even if there was a cross-distro certification program for the common stuff, if I were Red Hat, I would also want to certify people on the Red-Hat-specific things in order for my distro to gain credibility with corporate users (which is one of their target markets).
Sure, Red Hat is a for-profit corporation and they are competing for market share, but so far, in general, they're doing it the right way - producing GPL'd software and selling support.
Certification is a fact of the World of Suits. We all have to deal with it. It provides a quantifiable measure of expertise that can be understood by non-tech types. Anyone who's submitted a resume in the last few years knows how loading a resume with buzzwords gets it in front of the HR types, who then pass it to the technical types who DO understand (or at least should. . .) what you really can do. But you have to get by the HR types first, and ANY certification helps you do so.
.as to Red Hat Certification. If they were smart, they'd also offer a course to non-Linux admins, etc (admittedly, a longer course, but...), AND they'd modularize it (hmm. . .like M$ did...). Not all admins need to write code, but they DO need to configure users, run Apache, etc... In the long run, a basic "CLE", like the CNE or MCSE needs to evolve, if we really want Linux in the corporate environment. If you need to show ultimate expertise, i.e. writing new kernels, etc, why not a "Master" certification as well, like Novell has ????
Now. .
In regards to your first concern, I'd like to point out a couple of reasons why cetification may be a good thing.
First, as Linux's popularity (hopefully) increases, bringing with it the demand for employees, the tendency for less-than-ethical job seekers will be to inflate their knowledge. While this may not seem like a hard thing to defeat for someone in a Unix shop, for a company without any current Unix knowledge, there isn't a real easy way to figure this out. So the guy gets hired and their first Linux server doesn't work so well. The sad fact of life is that many (perhaps even most) of the people hiring technical people these days don't have the skills to verify knowledge in an interview.
Second, corporate employers have a hard time understanding the idea of "playing with the technology". For them, if you can't point to an actual job where you used technology "X", they assume you don't know it. Telling them that you've been putting two hours a night for the last few years will be met with blank stares. So certification allows those of us not so lucky as to have Linux jobs right now to get some sort of credit for the knowledge.