

And a Network Engineer Shall Lead Them - babyshake
http://www.cringely.com/2009/03/and-a-network-engineer-shall-lead-them/

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prospero
On the other hand, maybe a lot of people got laid off and decided to pad their
resume with this certification. If you're up against a lot of other people for
the same job, having an extra acronym may be (or seem like) a deciding factor.

Also, certification processes are much more valuable when the infrastructure
is young and there aren't that many people who have simply been working in the
industry for five or ten years. An apples to apples comparison between the US
and China on this basis isn't possible, and it's willfully stupid to pretend
otherwise.

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ShabbyDoo
I bet the number of Sun Java certifications will decline in the future _, but
it's probably more a case of less interest in J2EE and the Sun way of doing
stuff. So, with my indicator, we're all doomed.

Using Dow's transportation notion, we might look at the number of new truck
driver certifications as a leading indicator of the market. However, looking
at the certification rate for Freightliner vehicles (a non-existent
certification, but fun to think about) is more likely a measurement of the
relative importance of that brand of truck than anything macroeconomic. And,
rather than looking at certifications, why not look at number of truck miles
driven, number of truck tires purchased, etc. Shouldn't Cringly be looking at
Cisco's sales data for routers instead?

_ I know nothing about their numbers today!

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henning
How much did Cisco pay for this?

~~~
jrockway
I don't think Cisco was a particularly important part of this article. It just
happened to have interesting statistics.

The "doctor-doctor" thing was over the top, though. If that's true, anyone who
has ever written a line of Perl should win the Nobel Prize :P

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johns
This is the second time Cringely has written about this, the last time being
last August:
[http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080822_0053...](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080822_005393.html)

