Vendor independent certifications?

[Jerry Feldman]

On 03/09/2012 12:07 PM, David Rysdam wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:30:19 -0500, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:
>> As I alluded to above, IMHO, certifications tend to be living in the
>> past. Things change so fast in our industry that by the time a
>> certification qual is developed and made available, and people take it,
>> things are already old and out of date.
> While this is true, this is not why I find certs to be useless. I think
> they are useless because they've only tested you on (a subset of) how
> things are *supposed to* work. But if things worked how they are
> supposed to, we wouldn't need half these sysadmins. 
>
> What you really need is a lot of experience getting your hands dirty and
> yelling at the computer. Troubleshooting skills and a good feeling for
> how the entire situation should "look" and a feeling for what areas to
> start investigating when they "look" wrong.
>
> Like how an experienced programmer can usually tell a bug is a memory
> leak (and in what subsystem, based on the overall logic design) or race
> condition or whatever without even looking at the code.
Agreed. I think the only reason for certs is for both resume and snob
reasons.  The classic way that HR people look at resumes are for buzz
words. Sometimes they may add certs to the job req, but not often on
Linux or Unix. Basically in the Linux and Unix development and sysadmin
area, certs are relatively meaningless. And even in the Windows are
where certs are more actively used, they don't really mean much except
to the HR people.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id:3BC1EB90 
PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66  C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90


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