[Gllug] Linux/Uix Certs

[Philip Hands]

thomas thumb wrote:
> Hi all,
> Looking for a few opinions on Linux/UNIX certification.
> Firstly. If I apply for a system admin job in your company, would a
> cert influence you in any way? Are they a waste of time? Is experience
> all that counts?

Being an RHCX (a certified examiner -- some people at IBM were paying for
most of it, so I thought "What the hell") I'd say that as far as such
things go, RHCE is a pretty decent qualification.  It's pretty much
impossible to pass unless you have some feel for the subject, unlike the
multiple choice exams that would let a well trained parrot through.

If I knew that someone had tried and failed to get RHCE, I would not let
them anywhere near being root on any of my systems, but having RHCE does
not substitute for experience.

The flaws with the RHCE (IMO) are that it's too RH specific, to the extent
that I got the impression that certain mis-features were being left in RH
just so that there would be something to cause breakage in the RHCE. (this
was as at RH7.x --- since I've never used RH apart from the week when I was
doing the RHCE, I'm not in a position to comment about recent developments)

I also felt that if we were doing something similar for Debian, I'd want
the diagnostic scenarios to be a bit more subtle.  The diagnostic scenarios
are designed to be easy to examine, but don't reflect the sort of scenario
you are likely to see if you are a sysadmin.  They're not bad as a
reflection of what you might see if you were called in as a fire fighter
after the event, apart from being rather trivial.

They also tend to encourage people to "Just pop the rescue disk in" rather
than the (IMO) more robust approach of trying to get the machine up without
requiring some magic floppy (which will have a bad sector by the time you
need it, and there won't be another floppy in the building, and the machine
you're trying to fix will be a 1U rackmount, with only a USB floppy that
doesn't boot quite right, or none at all etc.etc.)

So, in conclusion, I don't think you should get minus points for having an
RHCE (whereas I'd probably put your CV in the bin if it had MCSE on it ;-)
but the experience counts much higher --- an indication that you'd run
several distros, and used proprietary unix, especially with an indication
that you'd written portable code (even if only a few shell scripts) would
count much more highly than the RHCE for me.  An RHCE on top would
certainly do no harm in that case.  On the other hand, I'd never hire an RH
bigot (being a Debian bigot ;-) so someone with an RHCE and only mentioning
RH experience would get marked down.

Cheers, Phil.
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