
Microsoft Retiring Master Certifications And Training - mkoble11
http://blogs.technet.com/b/neiljohn/archive/2013/08/31/retiring-the-microsoft-master-certifications-and-training.aspx
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BrentOzar
I'm a Microsoft Certified Master myself (of SQL Server) so I'll explain a
little about what's got everybody up in arms.

When you do enterprise admin work, you often can't share that work publicly.
It's not like someone can look at my DBA.StackExchange profile and see the
deployments I've done for StackExchange, AllRecipes, Discovery, etc. The MCM
was Microsoft's highest technical certification that gauged your sysadmin
skills, so that work you've done for high end enterprise systems pays off
here. When other high end companies came to call, I could say, "I'm an MCM.
There's only a couple hundred of us worldwide, and most of them work for
Microsoft as consultants - I'm one of the few independents." Combine that with
references, and it's just easier to get doors opened.

Of course, it only makes sense if the certification is actually hard - and
hoowee, was it hard. Originally, it involved spending 6 weeks onsite at
Microsoft undergoing a series of tests, culminating in a monster 6-hour hands-
on lab test. It was the toughest 6 hours of my life, and I've gone through
some pretty tough outages. There were no braindumps that could get you past
the MCM (unlike the near-worthless MCITP exams.)

Unfortunately, the MCM was too hard to achieve for most folks, and they
couldn't get the market adoption they wanted. It's really expensive to write
and administer these kinds of high-end tests, and Microsoft was faced with
updating the tests faster and faster due to the faster release cycles coming
out on the software side. Worse, they wanted the Master certification to cover
not just on-premise software, but cloud services as well, so you had to test
Master-level skills across both - but the cloud services changed constantly.
(Heck, the MCITP-level tests for Windows Azure SQL Database still has the
wrong marketing brand name on it even today.)

Just ended up being too expensive for them to manage in the face of limited
adoption.

The current MCMs are bummed because it cost us a ton of money and time to get
certified, and we never saw significant benefits from the program. The best
resource was the mailing list. (I'm not bummed because the cert has paid off
the initial investment for me, even though I put out something like $25k total
out of pocket.)

People who are currently working on their MCMs are bummed out because they've
invested a lot of money and time (in some cases, international flights &
hotels) and they won't finish in time.

~~~
harrytuttle
Solution architect here who spends a lot of time with Microsoft's stack. I've
got absolutely no certifications of any kind and refuse to take part in the
certification circus. It serves only to generate an ecosystem rather than to
solve problems and costs companies a lot of money.

We've thrown our partnership agreement in as it is not valuable for us and the
certification management is a pain. We can't get staff with certifications and
people don't want them any more anyway and we can't force people to take them.

At the end of the day, it's a dying concept. You can't get bummed out about
something which was circling the drain years ago.

Regarding fit for purpose staff, we've had people with wonderful CV's jammed
full of experience and certifications galore but when it comes down to it, a
blind monkey would be a better asset when you have you have to diverge
slightly from the preprogrammed certification skills.

~~~
BrentOzar
I somehow doubt you would have preferred a blind monkey over an MCM. Your
comments are totally fair for the rest of the certifications, though, and
that's why people are upset. The rest of the certs are often held by blind
monkeys.

~~~
harrytuttle
Agree but there are no MCM's in the UK.

~~~
BrentOzar
Sure there is - Simon Sabin, Christian Bolton, and John Sansom come to mind
just off the top of my head.

~~~
harrytuttle
And precisely how do you fill our 105 man team with such people?

(we're not a startup)

------
mkoble11
_The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the
certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there 's a
different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program._

Some of the thoughts/comments on Twitter towards this decision by Microsoft is
based on the move towards the cloud. What are your thoughts, HN?

On another note: I respect anyone who's gone through the rigorous MCM process,
but my next thoughts have to do more with certification in general.

Let's take software development for example. Microsoft has developer based
certifications. Is the certification more for HR who doesn't understand how to
evaluate someone's github account?

It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a
piece of paper is more important than work product....which in turn creates
more hamsters running inside the wheel instead of finding ways to break out of
the cage.

That's why I'm thankful every day for the amazing HN community.

~~~
corresation
As someone who acquired quite a number of Microsoft certifications over the
years (MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, among others, albeit a decade ago), I'll be a voice
that speaks in favor of them, and in favor of mechanisms like them.

Not as a hiring tool; Not to evaluate talent; Not to prove knowledge of a
domain to anyone else: For those goals they are _absolutely miserable_ , and
are why they earned such a poor reputation.

Instead as a personal target for learning things that you don't necessarily
have to learn otherwise, and the truth is that in this industry you can be
quite successful even if you're egregiously misusing and misunderstanding the
platform that you're building on. If I'm going to be doing a project in Visual
Studio, or deploying a database on SQL Server, or using the security services
of Windows, it is in my interest to understand the platforms that I'm using,
and those certifications provided a personal goal that I could shoot for to
achieve those rudiments.

~~~
dhughes
Yes, I mean at worst you could say it's better than nothing but certifications
do certainly light a fire under some people who otherwise wouldn't bother to
learn. And yes certifications can be abused by some, some people have
photographic memories (a surprisingly large number!).

I see some CompTIA certifications have implemented performance based testing
which is more knowing than memorization, which I like. Passing scores were
creeping up more every year maybe that was a response to people passing due to
memorization or sheer luck?

~~~
corresation
_who otherwise wouldn 't bother to learn_

This is worded, I think, a little bit pejoratively -- no one learns the
entirety of the systems that they deal with (whether Windows, Linux, Solaris,
mySQL, nodejs, HTML5, angularjs, etc. The universe of stuff to know is
endless), but instead even the most diligent practitioners get a working
knowledge and often don't realize the things they don't know. As a quick
example, I've done projects with seeming SQL Server experts, for instance, who
had no idea what ownership chaining is, and you can find exactly these sorts
of fundamental knowledge gaps in virtually any technology.

These certifications make you step back and look at a breadth of information
that you don't normally _have_ to, but upon gaining that knowledge you now
know the tools available to you.

 _And yes certifications can be abused by some, some people have photographic
memories_

The danger of taking certificates too seriously is that it creates a strong
economic motivation for people to simply do what is necessary to get the
certificate, with little interest in the practical ramifications or value of
the things that they learned. This was absolutely endemic with MS certs with
countless boot camps, etc, where you just pound in questions and answers for a
week and then do the test. Boom, certificate achieved, now forget all of that
abstract stuff you just learned.

I am absolutely and completely against such boot camps for that reason: If you
aren't practically incorporating the things you learned day to day, it simply
will not stick.

I would never hire someone or assume competency because they had these
certificates. However if I interviewed someone who seemed competent, with good
references and a solid track record, it would be a bonus if they had it,
simply because it is decorations on success, and does not define success.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I seriously thought certificates like this always meant the candidate was
weak. I never realized that these courses could play a positive role in the
developer's development. We have to be careful about what we include on our
resumes given the bias of people like me.

------
basicallydan
I know only one thing about what is actually involved in getting these various
certificates, and it's that there are a lot of big, thick books with vague
titles.

What I do know is that the whole concept of having qualifications which are
closely linked to the proprietary technologies of a specific business has
always urked me, so I feel like this is probably a positive step for the
industry as a whole.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
If that misconception is the "only one thing" you know about getting a
certification, then why do you feel it appropriate to comment on the process?

You don't need to buy the books in order to pass the certification exams.
Experience is often far more useful. A list of topics covered by the exam is
often provided, too. So somebody with experience can often easily supplement
their existing knowledge by reading some online articles or documentation,
without ever looking at one of the official books.

And one of the core aspects of certifications is that they usually very
specifically target a given product or topic. This is one of the things that
differentiates them from college degrees and other ways of suggesting
qualification. A certification can help an employer gauge a candidate's
abilities in a far more specific manner than a Comp. Sci. degree can, for
example.

Certification may not always have the value or reliability that it's claimed
to have, but let's not misrepresent it or its process out of ignorance,
either.

~~~
basicallydan
Fair points, perhaps I was a little rash. The reason I feel urked by the idea
is that it seems to me that it would lead to a greater lock-in of technologies
and products that a business can use. More investment would need to be made in
order to support a technology or product and thus would make it harder to
switch to something else if requirements changed. I can see the use of having
certifications for hiring as well as credibility to clients, but I feel that
there's probably a fair amount of danger in this too.

As for the books, that was an off-hand comment, half to illustrate that I am,
in fact, not experienced with the world of Microsoft Certifications, and so
whatever I say should be taken as comment from a layman :)

------
sker
Note that they are only retiring two types of certifications. There's still a
plethora of MCTS certifications. I got one when I was fresh out of college and
I have never made use of it. I don't even know what companies look out for
these things.

~~~
platz
For many of these certifications, they not as useful to the employee as they
are useful for the employer.

The more certifications the employer has the better it is for them in various
ways; sales opportunities, recognition, bids, perks, etc...

------
bsg75
I have never met a good, _experienced_ MS developer or admin who lacked a
certification and it negatively affected their ability or image.

I have met plenty people who held certifications whom I would not trust on any
of my production systems, and where it was apparent their time would have been
better spent gaining experience, not test scores.

These "Master" certs were time consuming and expensive, no? As they are backed
by a sales based entity (as with most IT certifications) if the revenue did
not support the program, it gets canned.

~~~
GoodIntentions
I've worked with really good, skilled and really not so skilled people that
held Microsoft certs. The folks that were not worth a shit on the job all
seemed to list MS certs in their email sigs.

Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time I
see them.

~~~
BrentOzar
> Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time
> I see them.

Me too, but that's why folks are up in arms about these cents being
discontinued. They were the first credible cents Microsoft ever had, and now
MS is saying they're discontinued due to low adoption. MS wanted to see more
MCSEs upgrade to an MCM. Well, duh, they can't, because the vast majority of
MCSEs don't actually have skills.

------
pearjuice
> It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a
> piece of paper is more important than work product....which in turn creates
> more hamsters running inside the wheel instead of finding ways to break out
> of the cage.

This so much. I have found the door of the cage years ago yet I jumped in the
wheel after a while (started CS) because that is the only thing which will
give you a reward at the end of day. Employers should really, really
reconsider the value of what you have actually done instead of basing your
qualifications on an artificially valued piece of paper.

------
dmourati
If MCSE stands for Must Consult Someone Else, what did MCM/MCSM stand for? I
kid, I kid.

~~~
BinaryBrainz
Going off of a few other comments in this thread I would hope it stood for
Must Consult w/ Me or Microsoft Consults w/ Me. I've heard that Microsoft's
tests are some of the hardest in the biz compared to other associated certs at
the same level.

