Re: Certification ?

[Brad Barkett <brad.barkett () ubizen com>]

</de-lurk>

The thing about certifications is that on the vendor end, certs serve as 
a promotional tool for the company (or arguably, consortium) who is the 
issuer, and as a result they will never be as rigorous as they could be, 
because too much elitism is bad for business. Certified professionals 
become advocates, like a street team, and it becomes advantageously 
tempting and financially valuable to lower the bar and create more of them.

Certs will never substitute for a degree, and a degree will never 
substitute for having a true passion. The whole point of requiring 
degrees is to help HR to determine which candidates are adequately 
motivated to support the initial passion and vision of a company, and of 
course the main reason employees acquire these accreditations is because 
they are ultimately unsure whether they have the ability to 
interpersonally convey their ability to adopt someone else's vision, and 
thus, get and stay hired. So at its core is a deceptive dance of insecurity.

It's like cosmetics for resumes. People apply cosmetics because they are 
afraid of not making the cut with someone with which they desire to 
associate. Sometimes cosmetics enhance a good beauty base, and other 
times they substitute for it in a disastrous fashion. To be fair, 
sometimes they are just plain required, as with annoying clowns and 
pesky mimes. I may have totally overextended that clown metaphor, but 
it's parallel could be fields like medicine where malpractice costs 
lives, and besides, I just wanted to rattle any potential coulrophobes 
on the list. At least I didn't call MCSE's the "mullets of I.T." Anyway, 
I ultimately find both cosmetics and certifications to be a perversion 
of truth and reality. Which is retroactively hypocritical, because I 
hold several certs and a degree. I don't wear makeup though. :o)

Most certs and degrees are basically semi-mindless turnstiles requiring 
much memorization and little creativity--a trial by which the middle 
class courts and bribes the upper class into allowing them safe passage 
out of the potentially dangerous lower class. Then again, for those who 
lack entrepreneurial vision, they can be a boon, because if you've got 
the patience and initial capital to become properly degreed, it's not 
hard to comfortably coast along in middle management for an entire 
lifetime, by merely acting confident and pretending to know and/or care 
about your career.

The thing is, the *hungriest* people don't tend to focus on the 
"official" warrants of their worth as workers, as their focus is on the 
actual learning, and their [exceptional] work is merely a byproduct of 
their obsessive desire to learn, so their worth is never an issue called 
into question, because a passionate attitude is an abundant attitude, 
and a committed human mind consists of almost limitless energy which far 
exceeds any job description.

Almost everyone who breathes has a passion toward something or other, 
but certs and even degrees seem to be what happens when people try to 
square away a false or partial passion in order to secure sustenance for 
other truer passions, like children, hobbies, or reality television. 
Some would argue that this somewhat cynical view is an 
oversimplification of the matter, and that at the very least, certs and 
degrees expose candidates to the theoretical concepts and the subtle 
nuances within their chosen field--knowledge which may not be easily 
attainable through the rather hectic and overly pragmatic world of 
direct work experience--and in the era before the internet, I would have 
probably agreed with you, but IMO universities are no longer the central 
repository for knowledge they once were.

It seems to me that most of the people who work in I.T. are not really 
natural computer people to begin with. Additionally most people in Human 
Resources don't really seem to understand humanity, and because of this, 
the certification industry will probably continue to prosper. The more 
the net becomes a slimy marketplace, the less it will remain an exciting 
scientific frontier, and so this trend will worsen. The deflation of the 
dotcom bubble caused a definite shakeout, but the economy will improve, 
tech will bounce back, and as in nature, surplus will again generate 
frenzy--with that rebound will return millions and millions of people 
who choose to lie to themselves and others about who they are and what 
they love, all for the sake of money. I dunno, perhaps I'm one of them. 
Regardless, in an alternate life I'd love to have been a "true" computer 
scientist in my 40s, because they are the men and women who truly took 
the world for a ride in the 1990s.

Of course, no generalization is ever completely accurate, and 
self-education and proxied education are certainly not mutually 
exclusive, but they certainly do seem to be two overlapping Venn 
circles, each contributing their moderate crossover candidates, and each 
with their larger body of staunch loyalists. Most of the constantly 
recurring and "classic" debates in I.T. [Mac/PC Netware/NT, AMD/Intel, 
HostIDS/NetIDS, MSBob/Impalement, etc] seem to share this explosive, 
ionic overlap characteristic, and if nothing else, within these 
subjective debates, it is the presence of this very overlap which 
prevents one view from being totally right, and the other squarely wrong.

Anyway, that's just my broad and overarching 02c. With the term 
"wizards" in the list title, I'm assuming you enjoy such abstractions.;)


Brad

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