

Are technical certifications of any worth?   - techslam
http://techslam.net/2012/06/are-technical-certifications-of-any-worth/

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droithomme
Even degrees don't mean much. It's not like you get to skip the fizzbuzz and
trivia/whiteboard gauntlet by virtue of a fancy CS degree from Yale. Obviously
certifications are worth less than Ivy League degrees, so that should give
some idea what certifications are worth.

The basic issue is that there are plenty of people with certifications and
degrees that can't produce, they are completely helpless. And there are plenty
of people with no certifications or degrees that are top notch producers.
There's no correlation. You have to test each person, you can't rely on the
paperwork from some third party to mean anything.

A related issue is it is not uncommon at all to find people creating
certification sets and teaching university classes who have no experience
doing design or development of real projects. Their experience is non-
existent, also known as academic knowledge. It's not surprising that many
students doing well grade-wise in these programs can not do real world work,
other than perhaps pursue the PhD and join a university themselves to pass on
their academic perspective, devoid of real world capability, to the next
generation of academics.

On the other hand, a portfolio of their own work and past creations is a
pretty good indicator of actual talent. People know what John Carmack, Larry
Wall, and Linus Torvald's skills are, and it has nothing to do with any
degrees they may or may not have.

~~~
mwd_
_There's no correlation_

I would guess that there is a very high correlation between CS degrees and
programming or problem solving ability. I've worked in a pretty good lab full
of grad students and their average skill level was dramatically higher than
what you find at an average company (or at least, what I've seen working at
half a dozen or so places), let alone what you see from average job
applicants. Upon graduation most of these people easily found jobs at places
like Google. They didn't get stumped on FizzBuzz because they had spent their
time on abstract academic problems without real-world application.

There are definitely some people with CS degrees who cannot code, and you
don't want to hire those people. The existence of these exceptions however
doesn't mean that degrees aren't a strong positive signal when you are looking
to hire somebody competent.

I think there's at least some reactionary bias against formal qualifications
in the software industry and in startups. Some of the old professions like law
or medicine do go too far the other way, but it's just as wrong to fetishize
"real world experience".

------
henrikschroder
In my experience, there are three kinds of people who get certified:

1) The highly competent who happened to be bored an afternoon and got one as a
joke, or just to check how easy it was to get one, or as a result of a stupid
bet. These people usually never mention their certifications on their resumes.

2) The competent people who were forced by their company to get certified for
whatever reason. If you ask them they'll tell you, and it might be on their
resumes, but as a footnote.

3) Finally, the incompetent people, who think the certifications are actually
worth anything. They'll proudly highlight what they got, thinking other people
will be impressed. When hiring, this is obviously a strong negative marker.

~~~
bane
> 3) Finally, the incompetent people, who think the certifications are
> actually worth anything. They'll proudly highlight what they got, thinking
> other people will be impressed. When hiring, this is obviously a strong
> negative marker.

Don't forget jamming all of the their certs onto their business card like they
have a PhD, MD, JD....except it reads some other string of acronym vomit made
up of decidedly less impressive acronyms like: John Smith MCSE, CISSP, MCA,
GSE, RHCE/RHCA, ITIL.

------
bane
Certs are a weird beast. If you are competent and working at a high level in
your field, certs not only don't mean anything, they're a negative signal.

However, if you've banged around in dead-end entry level jobs till you're 40,
didn't go to uni, and are desperate to break the $40k/yr barrier because
you've racked up a history of ex-wives and expensive child support payments
and spending yet another 5 years renting the room above your now elderly
parent's garage...they can mean the difference between $20/hr and a proper
full-time job with benefits and an actual real salary.

At those kinds of employment levels, and for those kinds of employers, we're
not talking about staffers or employers who are passionate about their IT
systems or development staff.

At those levels IT is a cost center, barely tolerated but necessary. Think "IT
guy for a department store". Managed at corporate by somebody who made a name
for themselves by being the top floor salesperson of ties and suspenders and
who told his manager one day in passing that he can copy CDs to mp3 files and
is therefore qualified to run the regional IT systems.

Both the employees and the employers in these situations simply have entirely
different life priorities than most of the folks here. To these folks the
certs are extremely valuable, perhaps a 20-30% pay bump on both sides.

To the corporate IT manager he gets to tell _his_ bosses that he has certified
staff (and not part-time hobbyists he wrangled up from the Geek Squad when the
local Best Buy closed up shop). This metric, at those levels of abstraction is
important.

To the employee it's a big pay bump, and opens up lots of mediocre, but better
paying jobs.

If you think of the IT world as analogous to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the
folks on this board are near the top, seeking Self-actualization, but the
broader IT world is closer to the bottom of the pyramid and is therefore
composed of many more people and positions in that pyramid.

Some folks are just simply destined to dwell in the lower levels of the
pyramid, either by circumstance or poor life choices, and the cert _might_ be
just enough to move them up a level.

------
bifrost
Typically, no. In my experience, anyone who hires you for the cert over
experience, you don't actually want to work for. Using the cert as a
conversation tool will usually get you shunned by people who work on whatever
you're certified in day to day.

Yes, the certs are often hard to attain, but for the most part experience
trumps them all and the only thing a cert proves is that you had time to read
the books and take the tests.

The one exception I make is for Cisco/Juniper certs, if you have a cert you
can jump ahead in the support queue. This could potentially save you
hours/days in the dealing with support and is generally worth it in terms of
time for you and your employer.

~~~
Hyena
I would think that certs would be useful in signaling commitment for people
wanting to join that workforce.

~~~
tptacek
Whatever marginal value they have as a signal of commitment is swamped by
their negative signaling. Top caliber talent won't usually be certified; why
waste the time getting "certified" by organizations that are probably less
competent than you?

Successive rounds of adverse selection produce a "certified" pool of
candidates who are unwilling or unable to achieve a basic level of facility in
their field on their own, which is its own negative signal.

~~~
bifrost
I agree with that basically. I've spent the last 10 years kinda being a
"fixer" but mostly a network engineer. I haven't had time for any certs, I'm
too busy working... When I have time for certs, who knows what'll be going on.

------
babarock
You can see from the answers in this thread that certifications, if worthy of
anything at all, are deeply looked down upon by the same kind of people who
read HN. And more often than not, these are the kind of people you want to be
working with/for.

Generally, certifications, however, are appreciated by the stereotype of the
HR department and non-technical managers of large organizations. If you have a
certification from a brand name stating that you know how to use a particular
technology, then no one is going to be blame for hiring you, even if it
doesn't work out. That's the stereotype and unfortunately, it is far from
uncommon.

You were spot on that people "can just clear this certification program just
by preparing through previous question dumps. Does this do any good to
anyone", but that's a broader problem relative to standardized test. To a
large extent the same could be said about your degree.

Finally, as mentioned globally in the comments, experience is far more
interesting than certifications. However, I may add that, for programmers,
nothing, absolutely nothing, beats a code portfolio.

------
raffi
When asked by folks I occasionally give advice to, I try to push them towards
creating something new and talking about it, writing an article, or
contributing to an open source project. This is a much better way to join a
professional community than attaching a certification to your name.

I've met (and worked with) folks who gain certification after certification.
In the information security industry this is very rampant. Unfortunately,
certification programs feel like empty knowledge. It's a lot of trivia, in
some of the better ones there is hands-on, but I'd argue that once you have a
foundation (from somewhere: school, work, cert program?) that you're better
off improving yourself and demonstrating your worth by contributing to the
community. Collecting more merit badges from cert providers doesn't really
improve you as a professional beyond a certain level.

------
Zenst
Certs help you get the interview, they don't mean you can do the job and
that's the real crux of them.

Most (not all) are pointless multiple guess waste of time and passable by
anybody compitent after they have drunk a bottle of vodka, been up for 5 days
straight etc etc.

Some are actualy using real good practical exams and those have some
crdability though they are few and washed by the tarnshish of certs being crap
since the MCSE multiple guess muppet days. I've been a situation were the MCSE
guru was unable to resolve a windows problem and me as the UNIX guru solved in
a minute using common sence and understanding computers. That to me
highlighted why alot of certs are bad.

Now sadly certs help you get past the HR people who have no clue about IT and
over the past 10-20 years grown into a egotistical power-house that controls
things they have no clue upon. 20 years ago I had a job interview, I was in my
late teens and was a etchnical position. HR interviewed me first and there
attitude was so sucking even saying I dont see why somebody your age should be
paid this amount. i then had te technical interview with the person who was
the manager for the job and his contractor and blew them both away with my
skills that they offered me more than I was asking for. I turned them down
just becasue the HR department pissed me off that much. So Brown and Root
engineering, you missed out there.

Sadly HR have grown and so have a whole generation of IT managers who don't
know IT or can use word and think that is knowing IT. These sadly have no clue
and will look at a CV for certs.

Bottom line if they need certs then generaly they are not a company that you
want to work for and if they dont demand certs and do proper technical
interviews/screening, then they are the ones you want to be working for.
Anything else is extra crap/stress you will never be paid to endure.

Remember that there is only one real certification that carry's any real
weight and needs to be respected and that is the certification of sane and
insane. Respect them both as one bites and the other knows somebody who bites.

How to get a interview and bypass HR, now that is a certification I'd study
for thesedays.

------
rdl
I consider the mid or high level Cisco certifications to be meaningful (I
don't have one yet, and wouldn't require one, but most CCIEs I've met have
been pretty good at networking.).

CISSP, CompTIA, A+ seem to be inversely correlated with competence, although
government and some employers require them (hence, I have CISSP). The CISA is
pretty much just for tech auditors (which is why I have one), and only seems
correlated with "able to be corporate and write reports" vs tech skills.

The Glock Armorer's cert is superior in its domain to any short tech cert.

------
barik
There are very few circumstances in which certifications are useful. Many
companies will, however, pay for you to get certified as part of their
employee benefit, so you should definitely take advantage of that. It will
give you an opportunity to work on a new technology or develop a skill in an
officially sanctioned way that can also be used during things like annual
performance reviews.

Additionally, if you are any sort of consultant, having certification can help
you acquire contracts.

Mainly, I've found certifications to be useful only when working with non-
computer folks. Against your own peers they seem to have little to no weight.
Fortunately, they don't really have any negative weight either, unless you go
around flaunting them.

------
simonsarris
There's a certification that always seems to be overlooked in these
discussions but seems to be much agreed upon and present in other discussions,
though for some reason its rarely mentioned in this topic.

When hiring my company's policy is that a _code sample_ is a perfectly
acceptable certification, often far more acceptable and telling than some of
the more expensive forms.

And I think that we should all think of code samples as such. Especially if
the code is public, or accepted into a (large/open source) project. A code
sample is a certification, and one that is literally put to use in a
production system/application has got to be one of the most valuable kinds of
certification - that is, social proof - that one can achieve.

------
zdw
Certifications are proof that you passed a test. This either means that you
memorized a battery of questions, or you actually know the material.

Going with the latter (as the former would be weeded out nearly immediately on
the job), it means that you know at least something about a topic, and are
able to be trained on it.

Certs are more useful/common in the ops word. Personally I do the
training/certification when I want to learn how to run a new operating system
or application. It's a motivational time limit, and should teach you the
basics at a minimum.

The other reason they're popular is they're a way to jump up the ladder at
various workplaces that don't allow other methods of internal advancement,
which is pretty dumb.

------
hpatel
Certification is a form of social proof, and a shortcut to find people who
might be qualified in some industries.

They are worth it if your 'customer' (employer, actual customer, other) cares.
But, thinking about acquiring social proof rather than certifications leads to
a more interesting set of ideas.

For eg., you can acquire Salesforce certification for their platform or you
can build a Salesforce app that customers use and rate highly. In turn, you
would use the app to generate revenue or give it away for free so you can get
multi million consulting contracts(slight exaggeration).

If you are looking to be cool with the tech crowd, no they are never worth it.
If you want to provide a service to customers, social proof matters.

------
mbailey
I am in a technical field (ops) full of them and I have none. I don't see much
worth in certs. Ability should be pretty obvious by performance in entry level
positions.

