Geeking Out

Created a new category this morning...Geeking Out. I'm sure you will be able to guess why. If this is going to bore you to tears, I suggest you come back later.

Technical Certifications:

My friend John posted a great bit on technical certifications on his blog the other day, and I thought I would respond. This topic has been bandied about my industry for a LONG time. I'm certainly not going to add anything "new" and "fresh" to that discussion, but I am a huge nerd, therefore I have an opinion. And I must be HEARD.

First, I have to say that those folks in IT that have been going on and on for years about how "a piece of paper doesn't prove my knowledge" have lost the war. Just do a quick search for networking on Dice.com. You would be hard pressed to find any technical job posting that doesn't have a certain certification as a criteria. This doesn't mean I don't agree...largely, I do. A piece of paper has very little to do with my knowledge. There is no substitute in this industry for experience. NONE. You can pile up certs from anyone, and if I am interviewing you and you have never worked on a network larger than your home linksys box, you won't be hired by me. Certifications do not prepare you for what users can do, what new technologies can do, or what you can do to your network. I have broken an entire network in three keystrokes, and if I didn't understand the protocol and what my network was doing, I would have been hard pressed to recover. Until you have experienced a broadcast storm, you have no idea what it is going to look like and how you are going to find the issue and fix it.

I need to be able to run a packet sniffer and figure out what is going on. Find me a cert that will do that. It doesn't exist.

Having said all of that, here's what a cert DOES prove. It proves that you have enough dedication to be able to focus on a single task for a given amount of time, until completion. This is pretty critical. There are too many techies out there who are easily distracted. I should know, I am one of them. By getting a cert, you are showing your boss that you can map out a project and find a way to complete it. Even if it's just an A+ cert, you still have to dedicate some time to it and finish it in order to get that piece of paper.

However, certifications are not created equal. Many of the vendor specific certs (I'm talking to you, Microsoft and Cisco) are pure marketing tools. They have become a way to extend a brand's technology further into the industry. MS and Cisco has created an ARMY of engineers who are single-focused and don't understand how networks really work or how applications work. Now, before you get all ticked off at me, I do know that there are plenty of MS and Cisco certified people out there that really know how networks work and how applications work. However, I think even those guys will tell you the same thing. There's another facet to this as well. MS and Cisco has seen how they can make even more money off of their customers. They change their certifications every two to three years. This way they can expire a cert and make all of YOUR hard work invalid. You have to go through the whole thing again in order to keep up. That, my friends, is a racket. You pay, and pay, and pay these guys to keep those things up to date, and they throw you tokens at the end, like access to special areas. Listen...if it's on the web, I can get it. If you have ever posted it, securely or not, I can find it. Not that I have special powers...I don't. But those nuggets of info that are for CCIE eyes only are all out there, free for the taking. Don't insult my intelligence by saying that what you have is special. It's TCP/IP, and it's been around a LONG time.

I do understand that getting a CCIE takes a lot of work and really does test your networking skills.  But, in the end, it's still vendor-specific, and Cisco changes or replaces open standards so that they can extend their brand into your network (Cisco VoIP, anyone?).  An example: if you try to tell me that Cisco IPSec VPN is standards-compliant, you are either stupid or lying.  "Keep-alive" is not a standard.  "Dead Peer Detection" is.  That's just one.  I have more.

So, as for my opinion, there are certs out there that I think are valuable in their own right. These certs are vendor-independent and try very hard to prove that you know how technology works, not how a specific brand works. I believe that these certs have the most value, and I also believe that clued-in IT directors feel the same way. If they don't, come talk to me. I believe the place for vendor-specific certs are when you work for that vendor, especially in a customer-facing role. that proves to your customers that you care enough about the product you are selling to spend the time getting certified in it. Nothing but good, there. I think that if you want to work for many years in this industry, you need to be flexible and not pigeon-hole yourself into one vendor's interpretation. It may pay-off short-term, but not for a long-term career. Your time has value...spend it where it counts.

So, that's my opinion. Hopefully this evening I can go into what I think about CES. I have some thoughts there, too. Time to go to work.