Re: How important is RH certification?

On 31 Aug 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup linux.redhat, in article
<1157015691.685992.276610@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, kc_cans1a06 wrote:

to be honest, I dont think the Red Hat certification is well known
enough to give you an advantage over the competition,

I dunno. They're aren't all that many worth-while certification
programs in Linux...

Web Results 1 - 10 of about 30,200,000 for Linux+Certification. (0.17
seconds)

Well... then again. Hmm, I recognize a few of these programs, but I
honestly have no real opinion of their value except to the company
doing the certification. They're not cash-cows, but they do bring in
the bux.

you really need the experience behind it. But even still, as the
market is currently going, it seems no certification matter anymore

Speaking from the low-mid level management perspective - no, the thing I
want to see is the experience. Where you _might_ find it useful is
getting past the HR filters that often get in place to "protect" us
from noise.

Think of this: Say I need a grunt who knows *nix and IP, has heard of a
command line, and will be able to take their turn on the hell desk as
soon as [s]he gets up to speed on the stuff we're using here (we have a
lot of internally built applications). I go crying the blues to my boss
(who then may have to go a step or two higher) to get approval to hire
someone. _IF_ (not when) I get approval, I type up a wish list of what
I want in this person. This list may get kicked around the department,
before being passed up the chain. It's not likely, but they _could_ add
or subtract something from what I wrote. Finally, it gets passed to HR,
and _they_ may dick with it (often without telling the technical type
who wrote the requisition in the first place) and they then "publish" the
want-ad, and then stand by for the deluge. It is most certainly _expected_
for HR to add things like certification, license and/or citizenship
requirements that may be required by law, and they _may_ add other crap
as well, _such_as_ technical certifications that are NOT required by law
(the RHCE would be one example). This is often unnoticed by the poor
technical sod who made the original job requisition, as HR thinks they
know what they are doing. Sometimes, I wonder.

A large number of responses normally. At the close date, HR sorts through
the stack of replies, and puts the resumes into (typically) four piles.
The first pile gets those where the response has all of the buzzwords and
if there is a "minimum years of $FOO", that is met. The second pile gets
those who miss not more than one qualification. Unfortunately, this also
includes any "bonus" requirements HR may have added, such as the RHCE
that wasn't on the requisition. The third pile gets those responses
from pimps on our "do not use" list, those whose resume shows they are
actually applying for the job of French Fries cook (you can't imagine
some of the "winners" we get), and other - clearly undesirable -
applicants. (Pile three is usually shredded, but sometimes HR shows us
a few for the entertainment value.) Finally, what's left goes into
pile four. They photo-copy the _resumes_ in pile one (cover letter???
wazzat?) masking out the name/address/phone number (a serial number is
used as a replacement), and bring that box full to the technical guy who
created the job requisition (in this example - that's me), for
preliminary selection. For the last position that we filled in this
department, there were around 220 resumes in that box. I have (typically)
a week to look through that (in addition to doing my job). Now _I_
didn't put in the Linux certification requirement, so I'm not looking
for it. Can you guess what I _am_ looking for?

Old guy
.

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