Why I hate MS
Bill McGonigle
bill at bfccomputing.com
Tue Apr 26 22:56:00 EDT 2005
On Apr 26, 2005, at 17:45, Travis Roy wrote:
> Oh, I agree, it's great for that, but for actual ability.... Do you
> think you really could have had more under your belt that you couldn't
> have found out on your own for a lot cheaper?
You're thinking about this the wrong way. Certifications are for
middle managers.
Last time I saw an article about it, almost all certifications are were
paid for by the employer. I see three patterns:
a) Bob is a techie. Bob gets certified on technology X. Bob screws
up. Bob's manager, Marty, gets caught in the ensuing shitstorm and
somebody is going to get blamed. They'd like to blame Marty for
putting Bob on the project, but Bob was certified as being competent,
so the fault lies with the certification body, not Marty. For $1500,
not only is Marty clear, noone in the company (except maybe Bob, who
doesn't really count in this calculus) has to take any blame. And
since you have no recourse with e.g. Microsoft, everybody can go home
happy that everything that could have been done was done. Time for
golf.
b) Marty wants to outsource some work. He knows nothing about the
technology he's in charge of and isn't about to ask his leaf node
employees for advice, so he hires a company with certified technicians.
c) A contracting company wants Marty's contract from b) so they get
their employees certified.
Looking at it this way, clueless MCSE's are the system working as
designed. If the MCSE exam were rigorous enough to identify highly
competent MS sysadmins how many do you think there would be? The
number doesn't matter - the answer is not enough. If there were only
25 MCSE's in NH people would stop looking to hire MCSE's - they would
be statistically unavailable. The MCSE exam is just hard enough to
keep the right number of certified people in the market and no harder.
Follow me on this path to enlightenment and feel your frustrations
slipping away.
-Bill
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