Debian "certification" Re: Any comment for RHCE?

[mako at debian.org (Benj. Mako Hill)]

<quote who="Matej Cepl" date="Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 09:40:25AM -0500">
> Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> > That said, I certainly don't take any type of certification
> > seriously. I'm always much more impressed by applied knowledge in the
> > from of visible contributions to the Free/Open Source software
> > community through participation or talks at a LUG, in support
> > channels, and through code.
> 
> My problem is that I have learned everything about Linux (and
> subsequently Debian) myself (using Linux exclusively since 2000), I
> have never attended any CS course (I used to be a lawyer back in
> Prague), and so I have no way how to prove to my potential employers
> what I know and that I know what I know (I do not consider myself to
> be much admin guru, but I think that I could do something around
> Linux). I thought, that in this particular case certification may be
> useful as a way to compensate for the lack of documents.

I've never actually taken a CS course either. My educational
background, before coming to MIT this year, was in literary theory.  I
can't speak for every HR department but when I can say that when I
look for new hires, the first thing I do is google them.

Once, I was looking to hire a Python hacker for an company I worked
for. I ended up hiring someone with no formal CS background but who
had done a near complete audit on the Python standard library. Here
was someone who was comfortable discussing the pros and cons of Python
internals and submitting patches, fixes, and optimizations into the
standard library. It was all on the web. This hacker clearly knew the
technology and who clearly loved to code.

They are probably companies that would have passed over this person
for someone with a CS degree or a certification. Honestly, these are
not the companies that I would ever want to work for.

Regards,
Mako


-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako at debian.org
http://mako.cc/