Re: Vendor independent certifications?
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:03 PM, David Rysdam da...@rysdam.org wrote: On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 17:17:05 -0500, Tom Buskey t...@buskey.name wrote: I'm a sysadmin and have hired some in the past. In the dot com era, we would sort resumes by lots of certs and experience. Then we looked at the resumes with experience. The certs got looked at if we couldn't find experience, but we never did. Yeah, any resumes that list certificates and have no experience are a major warning sign that this person knows nothing. If they've recently graduated, that could be fixable. If they haven't, it probably isn't. Even recent graduates have no excuse to not show some kind of experience. Except for the hardware, all the pieces are freely available, and with a bit of creativity/networking/paying attention you can even come up free hardware. (I'd be willing to bet an old computer (or sufficient parts to reconstitute same) that a request sent to this list by a resource-starved student looking for free hardware to use for learning would turn up more than one offer.) ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Vendor independent certifications?
On Fri, 9 Mar 2012 09:05:19 -0500, Brian St. Pierre br...@bstpierre.org wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:03 PM, David Rysdam da...@rysdam.org wrote: On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 17:17:05 -0500, Tom Buskey t...@buskey.name wrote: I'm a sysadmin and have hired some in the past. In the dot com era, we would sort resumes by lots of certs and experience. Then we looked at the resumes with experience. The certs got looked at if we couldn't find experience, but we never did. Yeah, any resumes that list certificates and have no experience are a major warning sign that this person knows nothing. If they've recently graduated, that could be fixable. If they haven't, it probably isn't. Even recent graduates have no excuse to not show some kind of experience. Except for the hardware, all the pieces are freely available, and with a bit of creativity/networking/paying attention you can even come up free hardware. (I'd be willing to bet an old computer (or sufficient parts to reconstitute same) that a request sent to this list by a resource-starved student looking for free hardware to use for learning would turn up more than one offer.) Yes, that's probably true. I guess I was relying on the last time I did major sifting-through of resumes, when computers weren't so cheap and Free software less well-known. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Vendor independent certifications?
In my experience, in the Unix/Linux marketplace for developers, I have not really seen where certifications are meaningful. Even in the area of system admins, things change so fast that certifications don't mean that much. There are some areas where certifications help, but that is in the Microsoft area. A lot of Windows admin people like to have all these certifications. As I alluded to above, IMHO, certifications tend to be living in the past. Things change so fast in our industry that by the time a certification qual is developed and made available, and people take it, things are already old and out of date. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Vendor independent certifications?
What Jerry just said. Working in IT on and off since 1984 and looking at, starting, and trying to complete, several certification paths during that time, it was more or less a fool's game. No sooner did we come close to finishing a cert, in Windows NT, for example, then Microsoft had a whole new cert process in place along with a newer o.s. (this was when a couple of iterations of my PHB manglers forcibly kicked me out of the VMS world into Windows). Same with the other vendors, to varying degrees. And of course we've all seen the paper cert and braindump stuff by now and the unpredictability of what HR people look for on resumes and applications. That said, I would venture to guess that if somebody was just starting out in IT and/or making a change to it as a possible career field; I'd mention that while I am not qualified to speak much about programming and development stuff, that networks are close to bedrock worldwide and having a good solid grounding in that would be very desirable. The CompTIA Network + path would be a possibility, as a vendor-neutral cert, but I would also mention that Cisco apparently runs on 80% of the world's networks now, so maybe CCENT or CCNA, etc. The 80% rule supposedly applies again to Linux, with Red Hat running on that percentage of enterprise-level Linux systems, so maybe the RHCSA/RHCE. Ordinarily I'd mention security as a foundation of IT learning, but I am pretty cynical about that from years of cop work and then having to mess with it before and currently at various gigs and discovering that it is routinely ignored, dismissed, looked at exclusively as a cost, and treated more or less contemptuously by PHB manglers and the higher-level execs and suits. Thankless, in other words. Other than that, and obviously talking out my you-know-what as a fossil sys admin and former BOFH, I would only say that if possible, get intern and project experience and go to install-fests, meetings, LUGs, and get on email lists, etc., etc. Network and talk to people, ask for help, etc. On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: In my experience, in the Unix/Linux marketplace for developers, I have not really seen where certifications are meaningful. Even in the area of system admins, things change so fast that certifications don't mean that much. There are some areas where certifications help, but that is in the Microsoft area. A lot of Windows admin people like to have all these certifications. As I alluded to above, IMHO, certifications tend to be living in the past. Things change so fast in our industry that by the time a certification qual is developed and made available, and people take it, things are already old and out of date. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Vendor independent certifications?
On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:30:19 -0500, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: As I alluded to above, IMHO, certifications tend to be living in the past. Things change so fast in our industry that by the time a certification qual is developed and made available, and people take it, things are already old and out of date. While this is true, this is not why I find certs to be useless. I think they are useless because they've only tested you on (a subset of) how things are *supposed to* work. But if things worked how they are supposed to, we wouldn't need half these sysadmins. What you really need is a lot of experience getting your hands dirty and yelling at the computer. Troubleshooting skills and a good feeling for how the entire situation should look and a feeling for what areas to start investigating when they look wrong. Like how an experienced programmer can usually tell a bug is a memory leak (and in what subsystem, based on the overall logic design) or race condition or whatever without even looking at the code. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Vendor independent certifications?
On 03/09/2012 12:07 PM, David Rysdam wrote: On Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:30:19 -0500, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: As I alluded to above, IMHO, certifications tend to be living in the past. Things change so fast in our industry that by the time a certification qual is developed and made available, and people take it, things are already old and out of date. While this is true, this is not why I find certs to be useless. I think they are useless because they've only tested you on (a subset of) how things are *supposed to* work. But if things worked how they are supposed to, we wouldn't need half these sysadmins. What you really need is a lot of experience getting your hands dirty and yelling at the computer. Troubleshooting skills and a good feeling for how the entire situation should look and a feeling for what areas to start investigating when they look wrong. Like how an experienced programmer can usually tell a bug is a memory leak (and in what subsystem, based on the overall logic design) or race condition or whatever without even looking at the code. Agreed. I think the only reason for certs is for both resume and snob reasons. The classic way that HR people look at resumes are for buzz words. Sometimes they may add certs to the job req, but not often on Linux or Unix. Basically in the Linux and Unix development and sysadmin area, certs are relatively meaningless. And even in the Windows are where certs are more actively used, they don't really mean much except to the HR people. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
