What is on Your Mind?

I have just been on RedHat SA 3 training course (4 days) and sat exams EX200 (RHCSA) and EX300 (RHCE)

The daft thing was that politics meant I wasn't allowed to take courses SA 1 or 2. So I learnt about stuff I would never use (SELinux; iSCSI; NFS Kerberos encrypted with user specific access rules etc.) and then took the exams.

Somehow I passed RHCSA for the course I didn't do, even though I didn't know a few big chunks so would score zero for those sections. Sadly I failed on RHCE because there's too much to remember about irrelevant stuff that I would never dream of using and it all seems a bit over contrived.


Given that the exams marks if you can pass the exam rather than how you perform in a real job, what do people think of it's value? It might look good to management and help get an interview, but as someone not looking to move, ........ ?



Just wondering,
Robin

Hi Robin,
I never had the chance to take an exam as if I were it would be on my spare time and money ( I dont have as kids cost a lot our days...) The only exams I passed were for my diploma and then I was student without a Job ( but hoping with a Federal IT diploma I would then find easily...)
IMHO certification is a must for someone beginning in IT or for a junior wishing to escape his present situation for better, but for someone that is not in services ( lients want to see you have the latest...) you know like me the content reflect only partially the real IT world.. and so we have knowledge that cant be learned and a lot of what you learn there is of no use for our Dept...
So I can only agree with you...

Best regards
Vic

I got the RHCE for RHEL 6 a few years ago and remember it being full of useless guff, such as configuring SAMBA users as well as users for other services, as well as iSCSI, etc. that you mention, none of which I've ever used (so, of course, have forgotten - it's hard to commit such rubbish to memory!).

And, while I've studied for the RHEL 7 RHCE haven't taken the exam yet, because it's expensive and full of much the same useless stuff.

It's probably good to learn a lot of the other, more useful stuff, just for your own knowledge, but I really don't think it's worth the effort, time or money to do all that's necessary for the exam (unless someone else is paying for it).

Probably looks good on the CV, but that's about it, IMO.

Hello rbatte1,

I NEVER discourage anyone from doing learning(by any good way). Personally I believe in this:
Thanks,
R. Singh

All depends on your customers.
Your current customers recognize your reputation gained in your past work - but what about new customers?
An objective and comparible certification in your CV puts you first.

i work with AIX, therefore my clients are always big companies (mostly banks) with big datacentres. I have none of these fancy certifications*) but i have a project record going back more than 30 years.

Would i (or, rather my business) profit from having all these certifications? I don't think so, but i have provable experience compensating for this. I suspect that for younger colleagues the situation is different.

Personally i think this certification industry is helping nobody except themselves. Instead of finding out if (and further certifying that) a person is capable of doing certain tasks the tests simply question factual knowlege. Now, suppose you are ill and need a doctor: would you want one who can name every bone in your body correctly, but has no idea about "therapy" or one who knows how to cure patients but has to look up the name of some bones in case they are involved? A person who can name all binaries in /usr/bin without error does not necessarily have the knowledge about how to use these to achieve a certain goal - and even if he does he might not have the wisdom (read: experience) to distinguish between a good solution and a bad one. **)

Certification testing, if it should really mean something, should be done in the same way academic testing is done: you get a problem description, create a solution for it and an expert or team of experts judge what you have done. They do not give you some multiple choice tests and after testing positive on 30 of these you are a physician. Of course, this would mean that the certification business would be a lot less profitable than it is now, because it would involve actual work on the part of the certifiers. But as their intent (like any capitalistic business) is not to deliver the best possible work but to make as much money as possible this has no realistic chance of becoming reality.

bakunin

________
*) actually this is not entirely true: i once was a certified MCSE ("Minesweeper Consultant & Solitaire Expert") because of a bet between me and a colleague from the Windows team. I was decertified 2002 because of prolongued disinterest in getting re-certified on my part. And i am still in business despite Microsoft writing me a letter which pictured my professional future without the certification in very dark colours.

**) the distinction is not good solutions work, bad ones don't because things that don't work are not solutions at all. A good solutions works AND is easy to maintain, well structured, uses the least possible resources, etc., etc. - a bad solution is a working kludge.

Hi,

I have no Linux/UNIX certifications, though I do have a degree in Computing Science. The funny thing is that the degree basically turned out to be useless, for me anyway. I realised very early on that what I wanted to do was sysadmin rather than dev work, and a comp sci degree in the 1990s was purely focussed on hardware and software engineering. The landscape for University-level sysadmin stuff is far better now, but was nonexistent then.

What I did learn from though was the part-time job I had while at Uni, which was doing weekend and evening customer support for a small local Internet Service Provider. The guy who started the company had a DEC background, so most of the Web, e-mail and FTP kit were VAXen running VMS, with a smattering of MIPS boxes running Ultrix for NNTP and a few SPARCstations for RADIUS authentication. So it was a really great place to pick up the basics of all kinds of things. And it was what I learned there that got me my first proper full-time sysadmin job rather than the degree, no question.

As it happens I too had an MS certification forced upon me - I had to get an MCP in Windows Server 2003 ten years ago so that our company had its quota of certified staff for its Gold Partner certification. My job had for years involved a pretty even mix of *nix and Windows senior sysadmin work, which is why I was one of the people picked to go and sit the exam for the thing since the outcome was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I can't say my MCP was totally useless to me though - I ended up keeping the little laminated proof-of-MCP card in our car, so my wife could use it to scrape ice off the windscreen on cold mornings.

So personally, I value experience first and foremost, and any certifications, degrees or other qualifications come second. If two candidates were both sitting at the top of the pile then the certifications could be a decider in a tie-break, certainly. But for me, it's all about the experience rather than the paperwork.