Alex Balashov wrote: > No doubt, I'm going to start a controversy here without wishing to, > especially since Digium does have a vested interest in pushing dCAP, but... > > 1) As is generally the case with certifications, they are mostly useless > and often actually an indicator of mediocrity. All the best people I > know - the rock stars of IP network engineering and/or anything else - > don't have time or inclination to bother getting these. > > The folks that do generally take the rote preparation required to get > them too seriously and as a result evidence a certain lack of creativity. > > You don't want someone who can answer some trivia questions for some > standardised test. You want someone who understands the technology at a > fundamental - dare I say, ontological - level. Someone who may not know > the exact syntax to fix a weird DTMF problem or a funny bug *right* > *this* *very* *minute* and can write it for you on a whiteboard faster > than you can read it, but knows exactly how to Google the answer in 15 > seconds but still understand its implications at a conceptual level. > > I most certainly have to agree with Alex here. As a hiring manager, I place very little stock in certifications other than as a starting point on where to ask some interview questions. If someone claims CCIE knowledge, but can't tell me much about routing (or even how he'd find out the information he doesn't know), then his certification is clearly useless in that regard. Same with other certifications (MSCE, Red Hat, etc). Paper's nice, but experience matters SO much more. It's like hiring a computer science major right out of college because he has a degree and expecting that to matter more than the guy who's been coding big, successful projects for the last 10 years. The CS major may have some great ideas academically, and he may indeed be a superstar of coding, but he's STILL going to need a hefty amount of training on how to work in a corporate environment, as well as training on how to get things done in our specific environment, so his piece of paper means really only SO much. When you toss him into a situation that requires experience to solve, he's liable to have to rely on others WITH experience to help solve it. If you hire the one with experience in the first place, you save yourself some possible headaches (and yes, I know this isn't a popular view with many hiring managers, as companies love to flaunt their new college grads about like trophies).
I've a CCNA and an MCSE. I'm also Sun Cluster certified, Solaris certified, etc. But it's been so long since I've actually USED any of these techs, that to hire me based on those qualifications would get you a far worse employee than someone without them who uses them constantly. I'd be spending valuable time relearning things that someone less certified but more experienced would know already. It's a bit like those hiring managers that like to ask questions concerning unix command switches. I may not know his favourite command backward and forward, but I know how to use a man page to find the answer. To me, knowing HOW to find the answer or HOW to analyse a problem is far more important than knowing all the answers right off the bat. That sort of knowledge takes the experience of knowing which paths are likely dead ends. N. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
