I'm a Microsoft Certified Master myself (of SQL Server) so I'll explain a little about what's got everybody up in arms.
When you do enterprise admin work, you often can't share that work publicly. It's not like someone can look at my DBA.StackExchange profile and see the deployments I've done for StackExchange, AllRecipes, Discovery, etc. The MCM was Microsoft's highest technical certification that gauged your sysadmin skills, so that work you've done for high end enterprise systems pays off here. When other high end companies came to call, I could say, "I'm an MCM. There's only a couple hundred of us worldwide, and most of them work for Microsoft as consultants - I'm one of the few independents." Combine that with references, and it's just easier to get doors opened.
Of course, it only makes sense if the certification is actually hard - and hoowee, was it hard. Originally, it involved spending 6 weeks onsite at Microsoft undergoing a series of tests, culminating in a monster 6-hour hands-on lab test. It was the toughest 6 hours of my life, and I've gone through some pretty tough outages. There were no braindumps that could get you past the MCM (unlike the near-worthless MCITP exams.)
Unfortunately, the MCM was too hard to achieve for most folks, and they couldn't get the market adoption they wanted. It's really expensive to write and administer these kinds of high-end tests, and Microsoft was faced with updating the tests faster and faster due to the faster release cycles coming out on the software side. Worse, they wanted the Master certification to cover not just on-premise software, but cloud services as well, so you had to test Master-level skills across both - but the cloud services changed constantly. (Heck, the MCITP-level tests for Windows Azure SQL Database still has the wrong marketing brand name on it even today.)
Just ended up being too expensive for them to manage in the face of limited adoption.
The current MCMs are bummed because it cost us a ton of money and time to get certified, and we never saw significant benefits from the program. The best resource was the mailing list. (I'm not bummed because the cert has paid off the initial investment for me, even though I put out something like $25k total out of pocket.)
People who are currently working on their MCMs are bummed out because they've invested a lot of money and time (in some cases, international flights & hotels) and they won't finish in time.
Solution architect here who spends a lot of time with Microsoft's stack. I've got absolutely no certifications of any kind and refuse to take part in the certification circus. It serves only to generate an ecosystem rather than to solve problems and costs companies a lot of money.
We've thrown our partnership agreement in as it is not valuable for us and the certification management is a pain. We can't get staff with certifications and people don't want them any more anyway and we can't force people to take them.
At the end of the day, it's a dying concept. You can't get bummed out about something which was circling the drain years ago.
Regarding fit for purpose staff, we've had people with wonderful CV's jammed full of experience and certifications galore but when it comes down to it, a blind monkey would be a better asset when you have you have to diverge slightly from the preprogrammed certification skills.
I somehow doubt you would have preferred a blind monkey over an MCM. Your comments are totally fair for the rest of the certifications, though, and that's why people are upset. The rest of the certs are often held by blind monkeys.
Six weeks (of equivalent salary) + US$25K + expenses is a significant expense. You state the investment paid off for you, but I wonder how often that would be the case? Is the ROI there for most candidates?
The IT industry is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate the certification and training needs of the industry to determine if there's a different certification needed for the pinnacle of our program.
Some of the thoughts/comments on Twitter towards this decision by Microsoft is based on the move towards the cloud. What are your thoughts, HN?
On another note: I respect anyone who's gone through the rigorous MCM process, but my next thoughts have to do more with certification in general.
Let's take software development for example. Microsoft has developer based certifications. Is the certification more for HR who doesn't understand how to evaluate someone's github account?
It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a piece of paper is more important than work product....which in turn creates more hamsters running inside the wheel instead of finding ways to break out of the cage.
That's why I'm thankful every day for the amazing HN community.
As for everything, it depends. It reminds me of a young office clerk who was helping in the IT department. After a few month she decided it was more interesting to do network administration, but she entered the company with a generic diploma and on the salary grid there is no path between office tasks and IT. She could have argued that she was already doing good enough in the IT job and thus was qualified for the position, but really from an HR point of view she could be BSing them as well, as there is no fast and simple measure of efficiency for IT administration.
The easiest path was to get a Microsoft certification and just apply internally for a job in IT. That went really smooth from the HR point of view, and she recognized earning a ton generic knowledge letting her understand better what she was doing.
">It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a piece of paper is more important than work product."
I can't speak to software development certs in particular, but I've worked in "enterprise" pretty much my entire career and I've done a fair amount of hiring over the years.
I've encountered vanishingly few people who truly put much, if any value on certs outside of the very top end.
Generally, I see them employed a simple filter, aimed more at preventing problems with "body shop" contractors/recruiters when posting entry to mid-level positions rather than direct hiring.
It's basically avoiding a torrent of wholly unqualified resumes at the expensive of some false negatives.
I've never seen certs as a hard and fast rule for higher level positions. In those cases, the requirements are going to be about accomplishments and demonstrated ability and potential hires necessarily drawn from a much smaller pool.
Personally, I didn't carry any certs until 2007 and it didn't seem to hurt me one bit. Eventually, I picked them up because my employer insisted, paid me for my class time and covered my exams.
One thing that's a bit frustrating is the prevalence of technology companies which require "official" course time to be eligible for their exams. It's a shameless money grab which works to exclude people who don't have the benefit of a employer footing the bill as I did.
I'd say that evaluating someone's GitHub account is way more meaningless than evaluating their certifications. Not everybody open sources all their stuff, nor necessarily uses GitHub. And most of the work one does, is usually for a company and can't be shared anyway.
What you say is very true. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that code associated with somebody's GitHub account was actually written by that individual. It's useless to gauge the ability of a developer based on code in his or her GitHub account that somebody else wrote.
If you are going through the certification paths just for the paper, then yes, you will get nothing out of it except a piece of paper for HR.
Decent certification paths cover many things that you might not have used in your github. They can expose you to different parts of the system or API. If you treat it like a learning opportunity, you will learn something new and the certification at the end becomes more incidental.
I think that one of the sad things, is that kids wouldn't be able to go and try at a standard grown-up level tech knowledge test, that at least somewhat recognized in the industry. Microsoft certification was open for everyone...
As to the usefulness, by looking over some 10 (15? gosh...) years back, I've got a lot more use from effors required to get two MSSQL exams, if compared to a databases design class in college.
To be a Microsoft Solutions Provider or similar a certain percentage of your people have to be certified. For smaller companies, it was an important marketing distinction.
As someone who acquired quite a number of Microsoft certifications over the years (MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, among others, albeit a decade ago), I'll be a voice that speaks in favor of them, and in favor of mechanisms like them.
Not as a hiring tool; Not to evaluate talent; Not to prove knowledge of a domain to anyone else: For those goals they are absolutely miserable, and are why they earned such a poor reputation.
Instead as a personal target for learning things that you don't necessarily have to learn otherwise, and the truth is that in this industry you can be quite successful even if you're egregiously misusing and misunderstanding the platform that you're building on. If I'm going to be doing a project in Visual Studio, or deploying a database on SQL Server, or using the security services of Windows, it is in my interest to understand the platforms that I'm using, and those certifications provided a personal goal that I could shoot for to achieve those rudiments.
Instead as a personal target for learning things that you don't necessarily have to learn otherwise
Exactly how I look at it. My MCSD in VB6 from 12 years ago exposed me to parts of the language I would never known existed if I didn't pursue certification. My MCSD.NET in C# did the same thing.
My MCDBA made sure I knew about SQL Server administration, query optimization, client access and every other relevant skillset with SQL Server.
If someone has a lot of experience but no certification in a particular topic it's common to bring up something they've never heard of in regard to that topic. That rarely happens with someone who is certified. They might not be an expert on it but they've at least heard of it, studied it and evaluated whether it was an appropriate tool to use for them.
Yes, I mean at worst you could say it's better than nothing but certifications do certainly light a fire under some people who otherwise wouldn't bother to learn. And yes certifications can be abused by some, some people have photographic memories (a surprisingly large number!).
I see some CompTIA certifications have implemented performance based testing which is more knowing than memorization, which I like. Passing scores were creeping up more every year maybe that was a response to people passing due to memorization or sheer luck?
This is worded, I think, a little bit pejoratively -- no one learns the entirety of the systems that they deal with (whether Windows, Linux, Solaris, mySQL, nodejs, HTML5, angularjs, etc. The universe of stuff to know is endless), but instead even the most diligent practitioners get a working knowledge and often don't realize the things they don't know. As a quick example, I've done projects with seeming SQL Server experts, for instance, who had no idea what ownership chaining is, and you can find exactly these sorts of fundamental knowledge gaps in virtually any technology.
These certifications make you step back and look at a breadth of information that you don't normally have to, but upon gaining that knowledge you now know the tools available to you.
And yes certifications can be abused by some, some people have photographic memories
The danger of taking certificates too seriously is that it creates a strong economic motivation for people to simply do what is necessary to get the certificate, with little interest in the practical ramifications or value of the things that they learned. This was absolutely endemic with MS certs with countless boot camps, etc, where you just pound in questions and answers for a week and then do the test. Boom, certificate achieved, now forget all of that abstract stuff you just learned.
I am absolutely and completely against such boot camps for that reason: If you aren't practically incorporating the things you learned day to day, it simply will not stick.
I would never hire someone or assume competency because they had these certificates. However if I interviewed someone who seemed competent, with good references and a solid track record, it would be a bonus if they had it, simply because it is decorations on success, and does not define success.
I seriously thought certificates like this always meant the candidate was weak. I never realized that these courses could play a positive role in the developer's development. We have to be careful about what we include on our resumes given the bias of people like me.
It has struck me that cert programs are a way for people in larger enterprise orgs to justify time spent diving in to stuff that they might not otherwise have had a chance to 'on the job'. The gained knowledge may be useful to the org later, but possibly not immediately.
I know only one thing about what is actually involved in getting these various certificates, and it's that there are a lot of big, thick books with vague titles.
What I do know is that the whole concept of having qualifications which are closely linked to the proprietary technologies of a specific business has always urked me, so I feel like this is probably a positive step for the industry as a whole.
If that misconception is the "only one thing" you know about getting a certification, then why do you feel it appropriate to comment on the process?
You don't need to buy the books in order to pass the certification exams. Experience is often far more useful. A list of topics covered by the exam is often provided, too. So somebody with experience can often easily supplement their existing knowledge by reading some online articles or documentation, without ever looking at one of the official books.
And one of the core aspects of certifications is that they usually very specifically target a given product or topic. This is one of the things that differentiates them from college degrees and other ways of suggesting qualification. A certification can help an employer gauge a candidate's abilities in a far more specific manner than a Comp. Sci. degree can, for example.
Certification may not always have the value or reliability that it's claimed to have, but let's not misrepresent it or its process out of ignorance, either.
Fair points, perhaps I was a little rash. The reason I feel urked by the idea is that it seems to me that it would lead to a greater lock-in of technologies and products that a business can use. More investment would need to be made in order to support a technology or product and thus would make it harder to switch to something else if requirements changed. I can see the use of having certifications for hiring as well as credibility to clients, but I feel that there's probably a fair amount of danger in this too.
As for the books, that was an off-hand comment, half to illustrate that I am, in fact, not experienced with the world of Microsoft Certifications, and so whatever I say should be taken as comment from a layman :)
Note that they are only retiring two types of certifications. There's still a plethora of MCTS certifications. I got one when I was fresh out of college and I have never made use of it. I don't even know what companies look out for these things.
I have never met a good, _experienced_ MS developer or admin who lacked a certification and it negatively affected their ability or image.
I have met plenty people who held certifications whom I would not trust on any of my production systems, and where it was apparent their time would have been better spent gaining experience, not test scores.
These "Master" certs were time consuming and expensive, no? As they are backed by a sales based entity (as with most IT certifications) if the revenue did not support the program, it gets canned.
I've worked with really good, skilled and really not so skilled people that held Microsoft certs. The folks that were not worth a shit on the job all seemed to list MS certs in their email sigs.
Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time I see them.
> Right or wrong, I take those mc* email sigs as a negative signal every time I see them.
Me too, but that's why folks are up in arms about these cents being discontinued. They were the first credible cents Microsoft ever had, and now MS is saying they're discontinued due to low adoption. MS wanted to see more MCSEs upgrade to an MCM. Well, duh, they can't, because the vast majority of MCSEs don't actually have skills.
> It's frustrating that corporations continually reinforce this notion that a piece of paper is more important than work product....which in turn creates more hamsters running inside the wheel instead of finding ways to break out of the cage.
This so much. I have found the door of the cage years ago yet I jumped in the wheel after a while (started CS) because that is the only thing which will give you a reward at the end of day. Employers should really, really reconsider the value of what you have actually done instead of basing your qualifications on an artificially valued piece of paper.
Going off of a few other comments in this thread I would hope it stood for Must Consult w/ Me or Microsoft Consults w/ Me. I've heard that Microsoft's tests are some of the hardest in the biz compared to other associated certs at the same level.
When you do enterprise admin work, you often can't share that work publicly. It's not like someone can look at my DBA.StackExchange profile and see the deployments I've done for StackExchange, AllRecipes, Discovery, etc. The MCM was Microsoft's highest technical certification that gauged your sysadmin skills, so that work you've done for high end enterprise systems pays off here. When other high end companies came to call, I could say, "I'm an MCM. There's only a couple hundred of us worldwide, and most of them work for Microsoft as consultants - I'm one of the few independents." Combine that with references, and it's just easier to get doors opened.
Of course, it only makes sense if the certification is actually hard - and hoowee, was it hard. Originally, it involved spending 6 weeks onsite at Microsoft undergoing a series of tests, culminating in a monster 6-hour hands-on lab test. It was the toughest 6 hours of my life, and I've gone through some pretty tough outages. There were no braindumps that could get you past the MCM (unlike the near-worthless MCITP exams.)
Unfortunately, the MCM was too hard to achieve for most folks, and they couldn't get the market adoption they wanted. It's really expensive to write and administer these kinds of high-end tests, and Microsoft was faced with updating the tests faster and faster due to the faster release cycles coming out on the software side. Worse, they wanted the Master certification to cover not just on-premise software, but cloud services as well, so you had to test Master-level skills across both - but the cloud services changed constantly. (Heck, the MCITP-level tests for Windows Azure SQL Database still has the wrong marketing brand name on it even today.)
Just ended up being too expensive for them to manage in the face of limited adoption.
The current MCMs are bummed because it cost us a ton of money and time to get certified, and we never saw significant benefits from the program. The best resource was the mailing list. (I'm not bummed because the cert has paid off the initial investment for me, even though I put out something like $25k total out of pocket.)
People who are currently working on their MCMs are bummed out because they've invested a lot of money and time (in some cases, international flights & hotels) and they won't finish in time.