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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