Should I get certifications?

dezmodium · 3 months

Yes. Six reasons:

It gives you a shared standard of design, troubleshooting and vocabulary.
It's a check box on the resume for employers.
It shows you give a damn about your job. You are expected to grow in your career.
It is, in essence, our licensing system. We get certified the way any professional does.
You won't land a Fortune 500 job without them.
Most people who dislike them are old and grumpy, resentful at the unending hard work and retiring 15 years later than their parents.

No. Six reasons:

They are best used with experience ... and you have no experience. This is a Catch-22. Tough. It's been that way for decades. Don't bitch.
I can't judge quality. I can't tell if you got your certs from Harvard or a Diploma Mill U.

Yeah, OK. Only two.

But here's the deal. Employers will bounce back and forth between requiring certs and waiving them depending on three things:

Do they like you.
Do you have enough experience to make certs unnecessary.
Have they been burned by a paper sysadmin

So get them, FFS

cparedes · 3 months

I don't know. It really depends on the employer, IMO.

In my personal experience, many UNIX shops (including places like Google, Amazon, and Facebook) do not give a damn about certificates - in fact, lots of these larger internet centric firms figure that the best measure of success and competency in a role are intense eight hour gauntlets and very technical phone screens (I'm not sure if I agree completely with this method of interviewing, but it seems to have worked for them so far, so I figure it's the best thing we have in our deck at the moment.) Other interview styles I've seen that have been pretty effective were take home programming assignments and technical screens that requires ingenuity in order to even contact the hiring manager (think about the puzzle that ITA Software posted all over Boston that required knowledge of QR codes, a ton of knowledge of HTTP requests, and simple ingenuity).

What matters more is the ability to troubleshoot, the ability to program, deep knowledge of system internals, and being creative on the spot. In opposition to skimmedit, I find that a person's interest in the field is easily judged with these sorts of interviews - someone who is not interested in the job will falter very easily.

On the other hand, I've seen many job postings in enterprise environments that want certificates, especially in companies whose core competency isn't in computing. In this case, certificates are a 'good enough' measure of competency without drilling too hard. Of course, you run the risk of running into a 'paper tiger', so this can be a bit risky for the organization, too.

TL;DR: DEPENDS ON THE ORG.

choppysrage · 3 months

I think it's worth it if you plan on doing other things than CMS management. If you want to move in to a more systems operational role, then it's a good baseline of understanding to help you along (providing you aren't just doing dumps). I've found that studying for certs helps with knowing WHY certain things go wrong in certain ways, and certainly helps point you in the correct direction when deisgning/implementing/troubleshooting anything. That said, if you aren't going to touch the technology again and aren't interested in that side of things, then there isn't much point.

jaywalkker · 3 months

Yes for all the reasons listed already and more. Outside of CompTIA, ITIL, and few other "process" type certs, they're all vendor specific so you learn the way MS, VMWare, Redhat, have designed their stuff to work rather than guessing it. You'll also learn some things that you probably wouldn't have come across otherwise. Like I learned in Win2k8 the REDIRCMP and REDIRUSR commands to remap the default Computer/Users containers to a specified OU.

NoyzMaker · 3 months

Certifications are great for creating a baseline of knowledge. They at least help you learn how to structure the questions more effectively to senior personnel. Once you have settled in to a career the "system" based certifications start to lose their value because experience begins to trump it by leaps and bounds. On the other hand "process" based certifications such as PMP, ITIL, Six Sigma, etc. will carry their weight in supplement to your experience.

antaios256 · 3 months

i am interested in this as well, and reading here i really think I will get my certs, I have graduated from a college with a computer technician degree and completed the CCNA curriculum but not written the test.

the only advice i can give (not having tickets of my own) is the best thing they taught me in school.

Trying to remember everything will just cause more problems than its worth. If you don't know the Answer, Know where to look.

clancyjr · 3 months

Yes. When I'm hiring, i look at experience first, certs second, school last.

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