[Gllug] Red Hat versus other qualifications

[Jose Luis Martinez]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Joel Bernstein<joel at fysh.org> wrote:
> On 1 Jul 2009, at 10:10, Matthew Smith wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I've been looking to get a Linux admin certificate, and was
>> wondering if
>> Red Hat was the gold standard in terms of making you more
>> employable, or
>> if the competition (Novell, CompTIA etc) were just as good.  Any
>> ideas?
>
> IME Linux certification isn't worth the paper it's printed on. All the
> RH-certified admins I worked with were morons who used GUIs to admin
> servers, just like RH taught them (in 2002-2006, this may have changed
> now). If you're hiring, I wonder whether certification is being used
> to substitute for competent interviewing techniques? I would hesitate
> to trust RH or LPI or whoever to do my interviews for me.
>
> Not sure what you're expecting to find in a Linux certification. Why
> not just hire sysadmins with experience? Are you looking for this as
> an engineer hoping to improve his job prospects or as a manager
> looking to hire people?
>
> Don't get me wrong. Recent anecdotal on-list evidence suggests the RH
> certification has improved to the extent that they don't ONLY teach
> admin using their horrible GUI tools. But I'm not convinced at all by
> the argument that you need to be "certified" to use their horrible mix
> of broken backports and ancient userland. Maybe "certifiable" instead?
>
> /joel


Certifications show a minimum of understanding of a given technology.

I have interviewed people in the past whose only skill has been to
have read a book about a given operating system. With a certification
at the very least I know they went through lots of material and a
serious exam they understood (in Red Hat certifications you have to
actually set up services like NIS, at least that was the case in
2006).

I clearly would not request a certification as the only criteria to
interview somebody, but I would certainly be more inclined for
somebody with a certification all other things being equal (and when
you get 10 CVs to filter for 2 or 3 candidates, you certainly take
those things into account). Where HR departments are heavily involved,
RCT and RHCE will be buzzwords that will open doors for you.

In any case, it does not harm, so I would not discourage anybody to
get as many certifications as they possibly can.
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug