Re: [fw-wiz] Certification ?

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To: firewall-wizards@honor.icsalabs.com
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 17:17:43 -0400

</de-lurk>

The thing about certifications is that on the vendor end, certs serve as
a promotional tool for the company (or arguably, consortium) who is the
issuer, and as a result they will never be as rigorous as they could be,
because too much elitism is bad for business. Certified professionals
become advocates, like a street team, and it becomes advantageously
tempting and financially valuable to lower the bar and create more of them.

Certs will never substitute for a degree, and a degree will never
substitute for having a true passion. The whole point of requiring
degrees is to help HR to determine which candidates are adequately
motivated to support the initial passion and vision of a company, and of
course the main reason employees acquire these accreditations is because
they are ultimately unsure whether they have the ability to
interpersonally convey their ability to adopt someone else's vision, and
thus, get and stay hired. So at its core is a deceptive dance of insecurity.

It's like cosmetics for resumes. People apply cosmetics because they are
afraid of not making the cut with someone with which they desire to
associate. Sometimes cosmetics enhance a good beauty base, and other
times they substitute for it in a disastrous fashion. To be fair,
sometimes they are just plain required, as with annoying clowns and
pesky mimes. I may have totally overextended that clown metaphor, but
it's parallel could be fields like medicine where malpractice costs
lives, and besides, I just wanted to rattle any potential coulrophobes
on the list. At least I didn't call MCSE's the "mullets of I.T." Anyway,
I ultimately find both cosmetics and certifications to be a perversion
of truth and reality. Which is retroactively hypocritical, because I
hold several certs and a degree. I don't wear makeup though. :o)

Most certs and degrees are basically semi-mindless turnstiles requiring
much memorization and little creativity--a trial by which the middle
class courts and bribes the upper class into allowing them safe passage
out of the potentially dangerous lower class. Then again, for those who
lack entrepreneurial vision, they can be a boon, because if you've got
the patience and initial capital to become properly degreed, it's not
hard to comfortably coast along in middle management for an entire
lifetime, by merely acting confident and pretending to know and/or care
about your career.

The thing is, the *hungriest* people don't tend to focus on the
"official" warrants of their worth as workers, as their focus is on the
actual learning, and their [exceptional] work is merely a byproduct of
their obsessive desire to learn, so their worth is never an issue called
into question, because a passionate attitude is an abundant attitude,
and a committed human mind consists of almost limitless energy which far
exceeds any job description.

Almost everyone who breathes has a passion toward something or other,
but certs and even degrees seem to be what happens when people try to
square away a false or partial passion in order to secure sustenance for
other truer passions, like children, hobbies, or reality television.
Some would argue that this somewhat cynical view is an
oversimplification of the matter, and that at the very least, certs and
degrees expose candidates to the theoretical concepts and the subtle
nuances within their chosen field--knowledge which may not be easily
attainable through the rather hectic and overly pragmatic world of
direct work experience--and in the era before the internet, I would have
probably agreed with you, but IMO universities are no longer the central
repository for knowledge they once were.

It seems to me that most of the people who work in I.T. are not really
natural computer people to begin with. Additionally most people in Human
Resources don't really seem to understand humanity, and because of this,
the certification industry will probably continue to prosper. The more
the net becomes a slimy marketplace, the less it will remain an exciting
scientific frontier, and so this trend will worsen. The deflation of the
dotcom bubble caused a definite shakeout, but the economy will improve,
tech will bounce back, and as in nature, surplus will again generate
frenzy--with that rebound will return millions and millions of people
who choose to lie to themselves and others about who they are and what
they love, all for the sake of money. I dunno, perhaps I'm one of them.
Regardless, in an alternate life I'd love to have been a "true" computer
scientist in my 40s, because they are the men and women who truly took
the world for a ride in the 1990s.

Of course, no generalization is ever completely accurate, and
self-education and proxied education are certainly not mutually
exclusive, but they certainly do seem to be two overlapping Venn
circles, each contributing their moderate crossover candidates, and each
with their larger body of staunch loyalists. Most of the constantly
recurring and "classic" debates in I.T. [Mac/PC Netware/NT, AMD/Intel,
HostIDS/NetIDS, MSBob/Impalement, etc] seem to share this explosive,
ionic overlap characteristic, and if nothing else, within these
subjective debates, it is the presence of this very overlap which
prevents one view from being totally right, and the other squarely wrong.

Anyway, that's just my broad and overarching 02c. With the term
"wizards" in the list title, I'm assuming you enjoy such abstractions.;)

Brad

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