[asterisk-biz] Digium certified asterisk professional or CCIE VOIP

[SIP]

Alex Balashov wrote:
> No doubt, I'm going to start a controversy here without wishing to, 
> especially since Digium does have a vested interest in pushing dCAP, but...
>
> 1) As is generally the case with certifications, they are mostly useless 
> and often actually an indicator of mediocrity.  All the best people I 
> know - the rock stars of IP network engineering and/or anything else - 
> don't have time or inclination to bother getting these.
>
> The folks that do generally take the rote preparation required to get 
> them too seriously and as a result evidence a certain lack of creativity.
>
> You don't want someone who can answer some trivia questions for some 
> standardised test.  You want someone who understands the technology at a 
> fundamental - dare I say, ontological - level.  Someone who may not know 
> the exact syntax to fix a weird DTMF problem or a funny bug *right* 
> *this* *very* *minute* and can write it for you on a whiteboard faster 
> than you can read it, but knows exactly how to Google the answer in 15 
> seconds but still understand its implications at a conceptual level.
>
>   
I most certainly have to agree with Alex here. As a hiring manager, I 
place very little stock in certifications other than as a starting point 
on where to ask some interview questions. If someone claims CCIE 
knowledge, but can't tell me much about routing (or even how he'd find 
out the information he doesn't know), then his certification is clearly 
useless in that regard. Same with other certifications (MSCE, Red Hat, 
etc). Paper's nice, but experience matters SO much more. It's like 
hiring a computer science major right out of college because he has a 
degree and expecting that to matter more than the guy who's been coding 
big, successful projects for the last 10 years. The CS major may have 
some great ideas academically, and he may indeed be a superstar of 
coding, but he's STILL going to need a hefty amount of training on how 
to work in a corporate environment, as well as training on how to get 
things done in our specific environment, so his piece of paper means 
really only SO much. When you toss him into a situation that requires 
experience to solve, he's liable to have to rely on others WITH 
experience to help solve it. If you hire the one with experience in the 
first place, you save yourself some possible headaches (and yes, I know 
this isn't a popular view with many hiring managers, as companies love 
to flaunt their new college grads about like trophies).

I've a CCNA and an MCSE. I'm also Sun Cluster certified, Solaris 
certified, etc. But it's been so long since I've actually USED any of 
these techs, that to hire me based on those qualifications would get you 
a far worse employee than someone without them who uses them constantly. 
I'd be spending valuable time relearning things that someone less 
certified but more experienced would know already.

It's a bit like those hiring managers that like to ask questions 
concerning unix command switches. I may not know his favourite command 
backward and forward, but I know how to use a man page to find the 
answer. To me, knowing HOW to find the answer or HOW to analyse a 
problem is far more important than knowing all the answers right off the 
bat. That sort of knowledge takes the experience of knowing which paths 
are likely dead ends.

N.