Re: Certification

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

Mark said:
> I can tell you that I've been on some 20 interviews here in Florida and
> every time I was interviewed by someone who was an expert in their field.

I've been on quite a few interviews in the last few years, and only
once have I been interviewed by somebody who was remotely close to my
level of expertise.  *Once*.

That's not to say that the other people weren't clueful, but, let's
face it, there just aren't that may real Unix experts out there who
want to go into management...

> I don't know what sort of companies you are interviewing for but that
> would be a giant flag to me that I might not have a good time at a company
> that treated their candidates in such an impersonal way.

Oh, so a small company that knows they need a router guy should
already have an expert router guy on staff to interview the person
they want to hire?  Don't you see the chicken-and-egg problem here?

And, let's face it, the hiring practices of a lot of larger companies
leave a *lot* to be desired...

> So, would you hire the guy with 1 year experience and the certification or
> would you hire the guy with 4 years experience with the Cisco hardware and
> no certification?

It depends, especially if the year of experience was extremely 
relevant to the job I was hiring for.

Look, I'm not trying to say that certification is more important than
experience.  I'm just saying that certification is not *worthless*.
There is value in it.

Keep in mind that I not only don't have any certification, I also
don't have a degree of any sort.  There's only been one job where that
was even a concern, and, honestly, I see why it was a concern for
them.  (I didn't have completely relevant experience, plus I had no
degree.  They hired me anyway though because they thought I would fit
in and I could learn quickly.  I did.  :)  Unlike most people though,
I have a ridiculous amount of experience, and much of it is very easy
to verify.  (Running a users group, working on books and articles,
etc. are pretty easy to verify.) I also spent (spend?) a lot of my
adult life doing *nothing* but Linux stuff (and not having much of a
life besides ;)...

Ah well...  Enough rambling for now...

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7320             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/
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